At The Heritage Foundation, policy experts recently exposed how China is murdering innocents for organ harvesting.
The April 7 event, titled “Organ Harvesting: Communist China’s Hideous Shop of Horrors,” featured Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., a panel of senior research fellows, and Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times and the host of “American Thought Leaders.”
The speakers discussed reports of forced organ harvesting in China and the implications for human rights. Among the horrors discussed is how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) profits from murdering healthy 28-year-old Uyghurs to sell their organs to the rich.
“It is industrial-sized, and tens of thousands of young people, average age 28, are having their fellow non-practitioners, Uyghurs, others of faith (targeted),” Rep. Smith said. “In two weeks, you can get a heart, you can get anything you possibly want.”
In China, a wealthy CCP member can order a heart, kidney, liver, or other organ needed to survive. The organs come from young adults who are executed against their will.
Ethan Gutmann, a China studies expert at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, explained that the target age is always 28 because that’s “when your organs have reached maturity and yet you haven’t started to deteriorate.”
An estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs are murdered annually for their organs, and organ harvesting has grown into a billion-dollar industry in recent years.
Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group in northwest China. The CCP keeps them in concentration camps to await interrogation–and eventually execution–for their organs.
Gutmann said he visited Kazakhstan, a country in Central Asia bordering northwestern China, and interviewed Kazakh refugees who had witnessed victims of the organ harvest firsthand.
Refugees “didn’t accept that people were being harvested, but they did describe disappearances, always at age 28,” he said.
Gutmann described one case in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where a nomadic Kazakh woman slept with another woman to keep warm at night. Until the woman disappeared.
“It was terribly cold in these places, and she only noticed that the woman was gone because the bed had gone cold,” Gutmann said.
Unlike China, the United States has extensive requirements for organ donors.
The process, which is based on voluntary donors, involves a referral, being matched with an organ, and receiving the organ transplant. The process typically takes years, not weeks.
Last year, Smith introduced the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 to combat organ harvesting. The legislation includes policies to promote voluntary organ donation systems and to hold accountable anyone involved in forced organ harvesting.
The House of Representatives approved the bill in a 406-1 vote. The bill now awaits approval from the Senate.