The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other rogue regimes ranked among the world’s worst traffickers, according to the State Department’s 2025 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, released last week. “The Chinese government deserves to be called out and face consequences for its widespread use of forced labor, particularly of ethnic and religious minorities,” said Arielle Del Turco, director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

The TIP report identified 13 governments with “a documented ‘policy or pattern’ of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps, or the employment or recruitment of child soldiers.” The dubious list included Afghanistan (“without implying recognition of the Taliban or another entity as the government of Afghanistan”), Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria (under the Assad regime).

Most of these nations are also counted among America’s top geopolitical adversaries.

The TIP also ranks these 13 countries in “Tier 3” for human trafficking concerns. The congressionally mandated annual report classifies all countries into three tiers, based on their efforts to counteract human trafficking. Tier 3 is the worst, reserved for “Countries whose governments do not fully meet the TVPA’s [Trafficking Victims Protection Act] minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so.” The 2025 TIP classifies 20 countries in Tier 3.

Of the countries classified as Tier 3 human traffickers, China is the most prominent. Specifically, the report identified China’s “continued mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) under the guise of ‘vocational training’ and ‘deradicalization.’” Other groups targeted by China include ethnic Tibetans and the Falun Gong.

The TIP noted that China continued to move away for mass internment camps for Muslim ethnic minorities in the country’s far west, in favor of “forced labor at external manufacturing sites” — in other words, state-sponsored slavery. “The government denied verifiable accounts and took steps to ban discussion of trafficking-related human rights violations and state-sponsored forced labor,” added the report.

State-sponsored oppression of the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, and other minority groups goes beyond mere slavery to crueler practices designed to gradually eliminate these minority groups, such as brainwashing, forced sterilization, and even organ harvesting.

According to Doctors against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), after China’s crackdown on the Falun Gong began in 1999, Chinese transplant volumes “surged by 250%, compared to a global increase of only 10–15%.” Dr. Andreas Weber, DAFOH’s vice president for Europe, argued that “Twenty-five years of torture, brainwashing, and forced organ harvesting is more than a human rights abuse — it has taken on the signs of a cold genocide.”

In fact, the CCP now uses these ethnic and religious minorities as a sort of living organ bank, Weber argued at a Friday panel discussion in Washington, D.C. He related an anecdote of a German patient with a rare blood type who needed a liver transplant, and China found a matching organ in an astonishing six months. The patient, who was an alcoholic, travelled to China for three liver transplants (that matched her rare blood type).

The CCP’s crackdown against Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang began more recently than its crackdown against the Falun Gong. However, this new population provides the regime with a significant new source of manpower for forced labor, as well as organs for harvesting. Weber explained that demand for Uyghur organs is high in Muslim countries because their organs are considered “halal,” meeting Islamic cleanliness standards.

“It’s disgusting that the world’s second richest country collects an estimated $236 billion from these types of human rights abuses,” declared Del Turco. “American lawmakers and companies should be diligent in protecting American consumers from unknowingly participating in these atrocities.”

In addition to China’s forced labor campaign, the State Department also highlighted the government’s participation in, or toleration of, ordinary human trafficking. “Chinese officials operating in other countries may have facilitated both the sex trafficking of Chinese nationals abroad through lax visa and immigration procedures and the labor trafficking of Chinese nationals abroad in BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] projects,” the report noted. Additionally, “Women and girls from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and several countries in Africa experience forced labor in domestic service, forced concubinage leading to forced childbearing, and sex trafficking via forced and fraudulent marriage to Chinese men.”

“This is an absolute assault on human dignity,” said David Closson, director of FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview, on “Washington Watch.” “The fact that people are viewed as resources to be exploited, rather than as the precious individuals that they are made in God’s image — this is something that should have the attention [of] Christians, of course, but of all Americans.”

“We are made in the image of God,” Closson continued, alluding to Genesis 1:26, “so that our worth, our dignity, our value is not bestowed upon us by a government. It’s not bestowed upon us by the United Nations. It comes to us from God. Our dignity as human beings is inherent. And what trafficking does is really assaults that dignity … by reducing people made in God’s image as really objects that can be exploited and mistreated and abused.”

Closson offered this not merely as his own opinion, but as the counsel of the Holy Scriptures. “Proverbs 31[:4-9] tells us, as Christians, we’re called to protect the vulnerable,” he said. “And of course, as Christians, we know the whole reason that government exists is to promote good and to restrain evil. This is Romans 13[:1-4].”

Unfortunately, he went on, the awful facts recorded in the TIP report underscore “the fact that we really do live in a Genesis 3 world. We live in a world that has been corroding under the effects of sin. Romans 8[:22] tells us that creation itself groans under the weight of sin.”

“Ultimately, at the root of this … is a spiritual problem,” Closson concluded. “Trafficking is fueled by greed, and it’s fueled by lust. … It’s a spiritual problem — that can only be remedied by the gospel of Jesus Christ.”