(Minghui.org) A astonishing post recently appeared on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok: “Communist Party, I now request that you conduct a thorough investigation of organ trafficking, so that people can live in a safe society.” Within a short period, tens of thousands of people responded by clicking “like,” and thousands left comments.
Several commenters wrote, “This is the first post that directly speaks out to the Party.” “Finally, someone made their voice heard.” Another remarked, “Please do not laugh. This person is a true hero—risking his life on behalf of all of us.”
It has taken almost 20 years for the general public to realize the severity of China’s forced organ harvesting. On April 20, 2006, a whistleblower from mainland China with the pseudonym “Annie” exposed a horrific crime perpetrated on persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. Her former husband, a medical doctor, confessed to her that he had extracted over 2,000 corneas from living Falun Gong practitioners at Sujiatun Forced Labor Camp. He told her that none of these people survived, as other organs were also extracted and the bodies were then burned. Few people believed it at the time and there was not much followup in the mainstream media.
Twenty years have passed. Where are we now as a society in understanding and countering forced organ harvesting in China?
The organ harvesting tragedy resulted from a top-down directive after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began the suppression of Falun Gong on July 20, 1999.
In September 2014, Bai Zhongshu, former minister of health for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Logistics Department, admitted to an undercover investigator from the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) that then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin had personally ordered the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. Before that, in 2006 former CCP official Bo Xilai admitted that forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners was the result of a direct order from Jiang.
When the persecution of Falun Gong began, Jiang was the general secretary of the CCP and chairman of the Central Military Commission. He not only launched the nationwide suppression of Falun Gong in July 1999, but also ordered the establishment of the 610 Office one month before, to oversee the systematic atrocity.
Lu Shuheng, a business owner in the United States, testified in December 2020 on how the Armed Police Corps Hospital participated in forced organ harvesting as early as 2002. Zhou Qing, the sister of Lu’s sister-in-law, wanted Lu to recruit US patients for organ transplants in Shanghai. Zhou was the director of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Pudong Hospital and later became president of Wanping Hospital. Zhou’s husband, Mao Shuping, was a former deputy director of the Shanghai Reform-Through-Labor (laogai) Bureau and later deputy director of the Shanghai Justice Bureau.
According to Zhou, they extracted organs from Falun Gong practitioners instead of brain-dead organ donors, often without anesthetics. “There are certain areas that you do not want to apply anesthetics,” she explained, “especially those vulnerable organs.”
In November 2022, Ushio Sugawara, a Japanese commentator, revealed that he had seen a Falun Gong practitioner at the Beijing Armed Police General Hospital in 2007, who was tied to a bed in readiness for doctors to remove his organs. “He was lying there. His hands and feet were all wrapped with bandage. They had cut the tendons in his hands and feet the day before. The doctor said it was to prevent him from running away,” Sugawara recalled. “In addition, people would curl up when they are afraid and it would affect the quality of the organ during the extraction. That’s why they performed a tendonectomy on him.”
As this crime becomes increasingly more common, officials have expanded the organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners to now include ordinary citizens. Public sentiment has shifted from suspicion to fear. Meanwhile, reports of missing people continue to rise in China, with many of the missing under the age of 35.
One blogger who collects information on missing citizens said that 107 people went missing within 22 days in October 2025. The number of missing people under the age of 35 was 136 from December 20 to 31, 2025 (11 days). The number of missing children and young adults exceeded 100 in the first two weeks of 2026.
China is known for tight surveillance, with countless cameras everywhere. But the common pattern has been, when parents or family members inquire about missing loved-ones, that they are always told the surveillance cameras “happened to malfunction” at the time.
Since the CCP began to suppress Falun Gong in 1999, Jiang Zemin saw forced organ harvesting as one more tool to “eradicate” the traditional mind-body spiritual practice. Starting with military hospitals, where detained Falun Gong practitioners underwent health examinations including blood and tissue (including DNA) testing, a “living organ bank” was established. This led to the explosive growth of organ transplants in China around the year 2000, as hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were arrested and detained. He Xiaoshun, vice president of Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai, stated during an interview with Southern Weekly: “2000 was a watershed year for organ transplantation in China. In 2000, liver transplants nationwide increased tenfold compared to 1999; in 2005, they tripled again.” On the other hand, the CCP would not explain the source of these organs.
Phoenix Weekly published an article in 2013 titled, “The Dark Side of Organ Trade in China.” The article reports, “In the past decade, it has become popular internationally to have organ transplants performed in mainland China. There is no need to wait for organs in mainland China. The required organs are almost always available…”
Huang Jiefu, then vice minister of the Ministry of Health, admitted to the media that organ transplantation surgeries were occurring on a large scale. “Across China, there are 1,700 doctors in over 600 hospitals that are doing organ transplants. So many of them!” he remarked.
Taking the Oriental Organ Transplant Center in Tianjin as just one example, their website stated that wait times for liver and kidney transplants was as short as one week, and not longer than one month. Hospital statistics show that the average wait time in 2015 for kidney transplants was two weeks, while in countries with voluntary organ donations, it can take years.
As discussed above, many independent testimonies have provided evidence of the CCP’s forced harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. Due to the CCP’s cover-up and tight censorship, the exact number of organ harvesting victims remains unknown, but the reports from Southern Weekly and Phoenix Weekly indicate that the numbers are now shockingly high. The surge in transplantation surgeries also closely correlates with the progression of the persecution of Falun Gong.
After continued efforts by Falun Gong practitioners and other human rights advocates, the crime has drawn international attention. The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, conducted numerous public hearings and received testimony from witnesses, experts, and independent investigators. The tribunal’s final judgment, released in 2020, states, “In the long-term practice in the PRC of forced organ harvesting it was indeed Falun Gong practitioners who were used as a source—probably the principal source—of organs for forced organ harvesting.”
Evidence of organ harvesting can be found even in the CCP’s own reports. Zhu Yongxin, executive vice chairman of the Central Committee of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, referenced organ transplantation in a eulogy in December 2022 entitled, “Deeply Mourning Minister Gao Zhanxiang.” “Over the years, Gao Zhanxiang had been fighting bravely against illness, and had many organs replaced. He jokingly said that many of his parts were no longer his own.”
This statement sparked heated discussions among netizens. “If a former vice minister of the Ministry of Culture had to replace all his organs, imagine how many parts officials at the ministerial level or above would have to replace?” commented one netizen. In other words, the “specially supplied” organs to extend the lives of provincial and ministerial-level officials are becoming an accepted occurrence, closely related to the CCP’s power structure.
The Party’s administrative hierarchy consists of five levels: national, provincial, municipal, county, and township, each level with a complete organizational structure consisting of five sets of leadership bodies (Party Committee, People's Congress, CPPCC, government, and supervisory commission). In practice, China is a one-party system with absolute power. Any order from the Party becomes a unified force across all five sets of leadership bodies. Based on publicly available figures for China’s five-tier hierarchy, each tier and each set of leadership bodies has an average of 10-15 core leaders. A rough calculation suggests that the total number of leaders across the five levels and five sets of leadership bodies nationwide is between 600,000 and 800,000. This does not include ordinary government officials.
The five leading bodies at any level have control over local public security resources, including the political and legal system, the police, transportation, hospitals, schools, and so on. The top leader of any of the five leading bodies can do whatever they want in their local area, under the rationale “the Party leads everything.”
This explains why the harsh persecution of Falun Gong has lasted for 27 years, and how organ harvesting has become a state-sanctioned crime.
With improved technologies and profit-driven incentives, the nightmare of forced organ harvesting has spread to the general public. For example, some schools in mainland China are conducting blood tests, blood type tests, and DNA tests on elementary school students. Everyone is tagged, and the results are recorded.
On January 8, 2026, Zhu Hua, a 13-year-old student from Xincai County in Henan Province, tragically died on the school grounds. The school attempted to transport the student's body by ambulance before his parents arrived, but relatives intervened, bringing a truck. Upon inspection of the body, they discovered a nail-sized hole in the child's chest and blood flowing from the corner of his mouth. This raised suspicions that Zhu Hua had been designated for organ donation and that his body was being taken away for transplantation surgery.
On October 14, 2022, 15-year-old Hu Xinyu, a student at Zhiyuan Middle School in Jiangxi Province, went missing on campus. It was later confirmed by people with inside information that he had become a victim of forced organ harvesting.
In 2024, Luo Shuaiyu, an intern at the Second Xiangya Hospital in Hunan Province, died mysteriously in his dormitory. A phone recording made prior to his death revealed that the hospital was in the “business” of locating underage children as organ donors.
These cases are only what has been exposed by the media, and many more might have been covered up or remain unreported. Many people believe that children or young adults who have “gone missing”—often ignored by the CCP government—were actually targeted for organ harvesting.
Eric (pseudonym), a Chinese dissident whose family are high officials in China, told The Epoch Times that China’s surveillance capabilities include tens of millions of cameras. Whether it’s a child or an adult, as long as there is a photo or name, the surveillance system can automatically check the location and quickly find relevant information.
Eric has personally handled several cases of missing students. First, the parents go to the police station to report the case, but the police station generally does not accept their report, or even if they do, they cannot find the person. The parents may petition or complain, and then will be sent to a case-handling center. Eric said that, according to the normal case-handling procedure, they should use big data to investigate, but this requires approval from officials, which in their case cannot be obtained. As a result, these students continued to be reported as “missing.”
Even the most comprehensive public website for finding missing persons has been openly interfered with. According to the Haixi Morning Post, the China Family Search Network announced it ceased all operations in July 2025.
“Officials shut it down because it would otherwise reveal that there are cases such as Hu Xinyu everywhere,” one person wrote online. “They just don’t want you to know how many people go missing every year!” another added.
For the past two decades, ever since Falun Gong practitioners began exposing the crime of forced organ harvesting, the CCP has consistently covered up or censored the information, preventing ordinary citizens from knowing the truth. Now, as CCP officials continue to solicit organ sources and even expand this crime to the general public, this horrific reality is on the verge of being revealed in broad daylight.
When the truth is exposed, it will surely lead to the collapse of the regime.