DIGEST
Forced Organ Harvesting in China: The Evidence
Source: State Organs (2024 documentary)
Primary voice: Dr. Wang Zhiyuan, founder, World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun
Gong (WOIPFG)
Additional voices: Liang Chun (WOIPFG), witness testimony recordings, investigative phone call
recordings
Type: Documentary film transcript
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT
A ten-year investigation by WOIPFG documented a state-sanctioned system in which
hospitals across China harvest organs from living prisoners of conscience — primarily
Falun Gong practitioners — killing them in the process.
Organ transplant capacity in China exploded after 1999: hospitals performing
transplants grew from 19 to over 500, and liver transplants increased roughly 30-fold
in six years — an expansion impossible to explain through legitimate donation or
executed prisoners.
China's official explanations — death row inmates, then voluntary donation — are
contradicted by the regime's own data: only 165 death sentences were carried out in
2013–2014, and major cities reported near-zero voluntary donations.
Waiting times of one to two weeks (compared to two to three years in the United
States) and a 26.6% rate of "emergency" liver transplants completed within 72 hours
point to an on-demand killing system with a living organ bank.
Undercover phone calls to hospitals, courts, political-legal affairs officials, military
officers, and members of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee corroborate that the
harvesting was ordered at the highest levels of the Party and carried out through the
judiciary, police, military, and 610 Office.
An independent 2016 report by David Kilgour, Ethan Gutmann, and David Matas
estimated 60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year, with a total potentially reaching 1.5
million since 2000.
The Statistical Case: An Impossible Expansion
The single most powerful category of evidence is statistical. China's organ transplant
industry underwent an explosive expansion beginning precisely in 1999 — the year the CCP
launched its persecution of Falun Gong — and the scale of that expansion cannot be
explained by any legitimate organ source.
Hospital capacity: Before 1999, only 19 hospitals in China performed organ
transplants. By 2005, that number had grown to more than 500 — an increase of over
20-fold in six years.
Liver transplants: In the eight years from 1991 to 1998, China performed a total of 78
liver transplants. In the seven years from 1999 to 2006, that number was 14,853 —
roughly a 190-fold increase in annual volume.
International organ tourism: Korean patients traveling to China for transplants went
from single digits (2 in 1999, 1 in 2000, 4 in 2001) to approximately 1,000 per year after
2002, according to South Korea's organ transplant association. Patients from Japan,
Malaysia, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United States, and Canada followed.
A Southern Weekly article — published by the CCP's own Guangdong office in 2010 —
confirmed that the year 2000 was a "milestone" for organ transplants: liver transplants that
year were ten times the 1999 figure, and tripled again by 2005. The global organ transplant
industry, by contrast, grows at 3–5% per year.
The production analogy: Organs are not textiles. Production cannot be increased by
working overtime. Each organ requires a human body. A 30-fold increase in transplant
volume requires a 30-fold increase in the supply of human organs — and thus in the
number of people killed or harvested from.
Debunking the Official Explanations
Chinese officials offered contradictory accounts of organ sources over a two-year period. In
November 2005, Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu told a WHO conference that
transplanted organs mostly came from death row inmates. Months later, a Foreign Ministry
spokesperson called the use of death row organs "very rare." Days after that, a Health
Ministry spokesperson claimed organs came from voluntary citizen donations. These three
mutually exclusive positions were all advanced within a matter of months.
Death Row Numbers
Even the death-row explanation fails on its own terms. Since 2007, all death sentences in
China require Supreme People's Court approval. According to data published on the Court's
own website, only 152 death penalty cases were published between July 2013 and September
2014, resulting in 165 executions.
The officially acknowledged transplant volume of approximately 10,000 liver and
kidney transplants per year dwarfs this figure — to say nothing of the Kilgour-Gutmann-
Matas estimate of 60,000 to 100,000.
Voluntary Donation
In 2015, the CCP announced it would stop using death row organs entirely and rely solely on
voluntary donations. WOIPFG investigated the actual state of voluntary donation by calling
Red Cross organ donation agencies in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and other major cities. The
results were devastating to the official narrative.
Nanjing example: After becoming one of the first ten pilot cities for organ donation in
March 2011, Nanjing received zero voluntary organ donations. In the preceding twenty
years, only three people in the city had donated organs.
Red Cross employees in multiple cities confirmed to investigators that voluntary donation
rates remained negligible — a finding entirely consistent with deep cultural resistance to
organ donation in China.
Waiting Times: Evidence of an On-Demand Supply
In any legitimate transplant system, patients wait for organs. In the United States — with
120 million registered donors and a fully developed national matching system — the average
wait for a liver or kidney transplant was two to three years as of 2007. Former Vice President
Dick Cheney waited nearly two years for a heart.
In China, the Shanghai Changzheng Hospital's transplant application form listed an average
liver transplant waiting time of one week. Tianjin's First Central Hospital, which called itself
Asia's largest transplant center, reported an average wait of two weeks and performed 533
liver transplants in 2005 alone. Phone investigations by WOIPFG to hospitals across China
in 2015 confirmed waiting times of one to two weeks.
Emergency transplants — the most damning indicator: China's liver transplant
registry for 2005–2006, covering 8,486 cases across 29 centers, recorded 4,331 cases
classified by urgency. Of these, 1,150 — fully 26.6% — were marked as "emergency"
transplants completed within 72 hours. Shanghai's Changzheng Hospital alone
performed 120 emergency liver transplants between 2003 and 2006, with the fastest
completed four hours after patient admission. An emergency transplant within hours is
only possible if a matching donor can be killed on demand.
Direct Evidence: Investigations and Eyewitness Testimony
The Undercover Hospital Calls (2006–2007)
Dr. Wang Zhiyuan's investigation began in 2006 after two witnesses — including the ex-wife
of a neurosurgeon — testified publicly that a concentration camp in Sujiatun, China held
thousands of Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were being harvested. The ex-wife
reported that victims were still breathing when their organs were extracted, and their bodies
were afterward burned in the hospital's boiler room without a trace.
WOIPFG investigators, posing as patients' family members, called 23 hospitals between
2006 and 2007. The responses were consistent and, in the early phase of the investigation,
remarkably candid. A doctor at Shanghai's Fudan University Zhongshan Hospital, a director
at another Shanghai hospital, and others directly confirmed the availability of organs from
Falun Gong practitioners.
The PLA 307 Hospital contact: A kidney transplant coordinator named Chen Chang
at the PLA 307 Hospital in Beijing described, over approximately a month of phone
calls, the operational chain linking government, police, and prisons to the supply of
Falun Gong organs. He explained that "the higher level" would provide documentation
certifying the source. He described the organs as coming from practitioners detained
around 2003 who had refused to give their names — identified only by assigned
numbers. He quoted a price of 230,000 yuan per kidney. From his tone, the business
was treated as routine.
After WOIPFG published initial investigation reports, hospitals became more guarded. But
the early candor itself is revealing — doctors spoke openly because, at that time, there was
no expectation that anyone outside the system would ask.
The Armed Police Eyewitness
In 2009, a former Chinese armed policeman from Liaoning Province provided WOIPFG
with a firsthand account of guarding the door of an operating room on April 9, 2002, while
surgeons harvested organs from a living female Falun Gong practitioner. The experience left
him unable to function: he suffered insomnia and depression for years, and his superiors
eventually removed him from police duty. He agreed to share his account on the condition
that its full content be released only after his death. WOIPFG published partial details in
accordance with his wishes and, as of the documentary's production, believed him to still be
alive.
Not organ trafficking — torture continued by other means: Forced organ
harvesting is not merely a black-market organ trade. It is a continuation of the torture
and persecution of Falun Gong practitioners — a crime against humanity in which the
state's security, judicial, and medical apparatus are jointly complicit.
The Chain of Command
Doctors interviewed by WOIPFG identified the organs' institutional sources as prisons,
courts, 610 Offices, Political and Legal Affairs Commissions, and the military. To investigate
these institutional actors, the team adopted a new strategy: posing as secretaries to senior
CCP leaders, National Security Agency officials, or Central Disciplinary Committee
investigators.
The Political and Legal Affairs Commission — the CCP body overseeing China's entire
judiciary, police, state security, and procuratorial system — established the 610 Office in
June 1999 specifically to suppress Falun Gong. Investigators traced the chain of authority
upward through this structure:
Tang Junjie, former Vice Chairman of the Liaoning Provincial Political and Legal Affairs
Commission, confirmed in an April 2012 phone call that he was in charge of organ
harvesting at the provincial level. Li Changchun, a former member of the Politburo
Standing Committee, confirmed in a separate April 2012 call that Zhou Yongkang — then
chairman of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission and a Politburo Standing
Committee member — was in charge of the matter nationally. A staff member at a Liaoning
intermediate court corroborated the institutional involvement of the court system.
Former Minister of National Defense Liang Guanglie and Bai Shuzhong, former Minister
of Health in the military's General Logistics Department, were also contacted during
investigation calls in 2012 and 2014 respectively, providing further evidence of military
involvement and top-level awareness.
Politburo Standing Committee confirmation: In June 2015, investigators reached
Zhang Gaoli — a sitting member of the Politburo Standing Committee and Vice
Premier — by phone during a trip to Kazakhstan. Posing as an aide to Jiang Zemin,
they told Zhang that tens of thousands of practitioners were accusing Jiang of ordering
forced organ harvesting from millions of Falun Gong practitioners, and asked him to
prevent investigation of the matter at Standing Committee meetings. Zhang agreed
without objection, hesitation, or denial — and told them to assure Jiang Zemin not to
worry.
International Response
In June 2016, former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour, investigative journalist
Ethan Gutmann, and human rights lawyer David Matas jointly released an updated
investigative report at the U.S. National Press Club. Their estimate: 60,000 to 100,000 organ
transplants per year in China, with a cumulative total potentially reaching 1.5 million since
2000.
Days earlier, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.Res. 343, calling on the CCP to
immediately stop forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners
of conscience. The resolution, for the first time, explicitly acknowledged that the U.S.
government was aware of forced organ harvesting, recognized its massive scale, and
identified it as state-sanctioned — distinguishing it from underground organ trafficking by
criminal groups.
Israel and Taiwan subsequently passed legislation prohibiting organ transplant tourism to
China.
Implications
The evidence assembled across this investigation points to a system without historical
precedent: an industrialized, state-operated organ harvesting apparatus in which
prisoners of conscience are maintained as a living organ bank and killed on demand to
supply a commercial transplant industry. The system is sustained by the full
institutional weight of the CCP — its judiciary, police, military, and political
leadership up to the Politburo Standing Committee. International condemnations and
legislative actions, while important, have not stopped the system. Once a killing
machine of this scale is operational and driven by enormous financial incentives, it
will not confine itself to its original target population. Anyone can become a victim.
Further Exploration
Sources & Follow-Up
Primary investigation source: The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution
of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) maintains archives of phone call recordings and
investigation reports.
Independent corroboration: The Kilgour-Gutmann-Matas report (updated June
2016) provides a separate evidence base and statistical analysis estimating transplant
volumes.
Legislative record: U.S. House Resolution 343 (passed June 13, 2016) is a formal
Congressional acknowledgment of state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting.
The China Tribunal: An independent tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC
delivered its final judgment in London in 2019, concluding that forced organ
harvesting has occurred on a significant scale and continues.