China’s (CCP) Secret Organ Harvest: Millions Imprisoned for Profit

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been accused of operating a vast, state-sanctioned system of forced organ harvesting, extracting organs from prisoners on an industrial scale to fuel a lucrative transplant industry. Estimates suggest that between 25,000 and 50,000 detainees undergo forced organ transplants annually, generating billions in revenue for hospitals and officials.

This practice reportedly began in the 1980s with death-row prisoners but escalated after 1999, shifting to prisoners of conscience as a primary source. The system involves systematic medical screening of detainees for organ viability, including blood tests, ultrasounds, and DNA typing, creating a database of living donors available for on-demand extraction. Organs are harvested while victims are still alive or immediately after induced death, often without anesthesia, to maximize viability for transplantation.

The mechanics of this harvesting operation rely on a nexus between security forces, medical institutions, and the CCP’s apparatus. Detainees are imprisoned in labor camps, detention centers, or re-education facilities where they undergo coercive health examinations focused on thoracic and abdominal organs. Once matched to recipients—often wealthy Chinese elites or foreign organ tourists—victims are executed via methods like lethal injection or surgical removal that preserve organs. Hospitals advertise short wait times for transplants, sometimes as little as days, far below global averages, indicating a supply of pre-tested, captive donors. This industrial efficiency is supported by falsified voluntary donation data and a lack of transparency, with official figures claiming only 10,000-20,000 annual transplants masking the true scale of up to 100,000 or more.

Falun Gong practitioners, a spiritual group banned by the CCP in 1999 as an “evil cult,” form the largest targeted population for organ harvesting. Numbering in the millions, they have been systematically detained, tortured, and killed since the late 1990s, with allegations that tens of thousands have been harvested annually. As primarily Han Chinese but deemed ideological threats, they are imprisoned en masse in labor camps where forced medical tests identify healthy candidates. Survivor testimonies describe being subjected to organ-specific exams without consent, followed by disappearances. The China Tribunal, an independent inquiry, concluded in 2020 that Falun Gong remains a main organ source, with no evidence the practice has stopped, contributing to China’s transplant boom from 2000 onward.

Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang, are another primary target, with over a million detained in re-education camps since 2017 under the guise of counter-terrorism. These facilities conduct mass blood and organ screenings, creating profiles for potential harvesting. Reports indicate Uyghurs are transported by rail to interior China for extraction, with estimates suggesting thousands killed yearly for organs. This fits into broader genocide allegations, including forced labor and cultural erasure, where healthy detainees are exploited as a “living organ bank.” UN experts have raised alarms over discriminatory treatment based on ethnicity, with organ harvesting serving both punitive and profitable ends for the CCP.

Tibetans, an ethnic group with a distinct cultural and religious identity, have also been implicated as victims of organ harvesting amid CCP suppression in Tibet. Detained for political dissent or religious activities, they undergo similar coercive medical procedures in prisons. Though less documented than Falun Gong or Uyghurs, reports from human rights groups and UN statements include Tibetans among targeted minorities, with disappearances and post-mortem evidence of organ removal. This extends the CCP’s control over restive regions, using imprisonment to eliminate perceived threats while monetizing their bodies through transplants.

Other groups, including underground Christians, Kazakhs, and Hui Muslims, face imprisonment and potential harvesting for their faith or ethnicity. These minorities are jailed in similar facilities, subjected to organ exams, and integrated into the transplant supply chain. The CCP denies all allegations, claiming reforms ended prisoner sourcing in 2015, but independent analyses of hospital data and testimonies contradict this, showing continued large-scale operations. International bodies like the U.S. Congress and human rights organizations have condemned the practice as a crime against humanity, urging sanctions, though global enablers in medical tourism perpetuate the demand.