Strategies to live longer are almost always in the news now. So profound is the interest in extended longevity that three leaders of the most autocratic nations on the planet were recently heard discussing the topic on a hot mic in, of all places, Tiananmen Square, the site of the student protest brutally put down by the Communist government in June 1989. In the recording, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean boss Kim Jong Un are overheard talking about the prospect of living many decades longer. Putin says, “In a few years, with the development of biotechnology, human organs can be constantly transplanted so that (people) can live younger and younger, and even become immortal.” Xi replies succinctly, “The prediction is that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”

Meanwhile, over at CNN, a new series hosted by commentator Kara Swisher is exploring the many tactics being deployed by a cadre of tech entrepreneurs to extend their lives through a variety of measures that test the limits of believability. Focused on her connections to San Francisco and the denizens of Silicon Valley, Swisher’s series ultimately takes a jaundiced view of efforts to evade mortality, including everything from son-to-father blood plasma transfusions to stem cell infusions, and the vision of uploading human consciousness into a machine. The interest of tyrants and tech bros in these topics is disconcerting, but none exceeds the brutality of the longevity scheme that has arisen in the form of commercial organ transplantation.

Organ transplant medicine covers a range of procedures that have shown benefit to humankind. Blood donations between humans date to 1818, when British ob-gyn James Blundell successfully transfused a woman suffering from a postpartum hemorrhage. Bone marrow transplantation dates back only half a century from today, and its history was fraught with failed attempts to aid the sickest of patients with cancer and immune function disorders. Whole or partial organ transplants of kidneys, liver, and heart are similarly recent, relying in part on progress in matching and organ-rejection therapies. The first successful kidney transplant between related people (identical twins) came in December 1954, the first liver transplant in 1963, and the first heart transplant in 1967 in South Africa by the renowned Dr. Christian Barnard.

These medical advances were decades in the making and multi-disciplinary. They have always been attended by ethical concerns about such questions as beneficence, risk-benefit (to the donor and donee alike), prioritization of recipients, and ensuring donations of blood and other tissues are truly voluntary and not commercialized. Over the years, an array of new issues has arisen with proposals to create and harvest human tissues through such pathways as human embryonic stem cells, cloning, and human-animal chimeras that might yield organs for transplantation into humans. In each of these areas, grave ethical questions arise, but one process that has been consistently condemned is a trade in human organs in either a commercial marketplace or via enterprises run by totalitarian governments. Over the past few decades, an especially egregious situation has arisen with respect to the People’s Republic of China and its communist government.

A new book by Jan Jekielek, a writer for The Epoch Times, with a foreword by Ambassador Sam Brownback, lays out the shocking history of forced organ harvesting in Chinese hospitals. Jekielek’s work was recently featured at a presentation at the Heritage Foundation, which has devoted new resources to the examination of developments in biotechnology that threaten human dignity. The book is a searing account of a practice that has surged under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1999, enabled by the CCP’s disregard for the individual right to life and growing access to human organs thanks to its persecution of the Falun Gong movement. Falun Gong is a voluntary movement of Chinese people that, its practitioners say, promotes health and healing by guiding its adherents to seek “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance.” Jekielek’s analysis of the CCP makes clear how the CCP amasses and retains power by ruthlessly suppressing any alternative belief systems, including Christianity and its Muslim Uyghur population. He writes, “What makes totalitarianism distinct is that it allows for no independent organizing principle outside the state.”

The consequence of one-party statism, and no respect for life, has ranged from the installation of China’s murderous one-child policy, under which forced insertion of intrauterine devices, forced sterilization, and compulsory abortions became commonplace, to the spread of organ harvesting from executed Falun Gong prisoners and the Uyghur population held in military-controlled concentration camps. As one would expect, China’s practices have been challenging to examine and virtually impossible to reform. Jekielek documents how understanding of the crimes in the West has proceeded as individuals who escaped from captivity shared their stories, as did the breakthrough account by a Chinese citizen named Cheng Pei Ming, who escaped from China and shared in 2024 how parts of his liver and lung were forcibly harvested, facts verified after he was examined by medical experts in the West.

Impetus for the forced organ trade is supplied by the demands of Chinese elites in the CCP who have the benefit of wealth and guaranteed health benefits in dedicated Chinese hospitals. As Jekielek and other experts have amassed evidence of these horrors, quantification of the organ sales has reached tens of thousands of cases. Numerous reports have reached the outside world as patients outside China recount how they have been able to schedule organ transplant procedures for high prices and travel to China for their surgeries. Under normal conditions in other nations, organ donation and transplantation involve considerable waiting times as the donor population is limited and matching of donor and patient type must occur. Patients in severe cases in the free world frequently do not receive help, but in China, where persecuted minorities can be tissue-typed and categorized in large numbers, organs can be had on short notice with prices ranging above $100,000. Thus, the title of Jekielek’s book, “Killed to Order.”

The effort to expose and, to the extent possible, arrest these crimes against humanity has occupied Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) since his first hearings on these subjects back in the 1990s. A quarter century of sustained efforts, reports from international bodies, both public and private, and personal testimonies have established the extent and gravity of such problems as trafficking in persons and organs for transplant. Rep. Smith has devoted decades in office as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to the passage of legislation to deter and punish traffickers. In October 2000, then-President Clinton signed into law the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), the first law on the topic and a model for action on the organ trade as well. The TVPA provided funds for the enforcement of anti-trafficking provisions of federal law and for grants for assistance to shelters and rehabilitation for victims. It provided for criminal penalties, including life imprisonment for domestic traffickers as well as severe economic penalties for overseas traffickers.

Accomplishing a similar result in the forced organ donation context has been a similar odyssey, despite overwhelmingly bipartisan support for Rep. Smith’s bill titled The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025. A version of the bill passed the House of Representatives in March 2023 by a vote of 403-2. In that Congress, the bill failed to move forward in the U.S. Senate, and that sticking point has held so far in the current Congress. Last year, the House voted once again, this time by a margin of 406-1, to adopt the bill. 

Undaunted by past delays and boosted by renewed bipartisan support, Smith held a hearing last Thursday that underscored the continuing urgent need for the law. The hearing was sponsored by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. It included two eyewitnesses to the abuses committed in Chinese detention camps. One former prisoner of a Shanghai Prisons Hospital, Seyed Alireza “Ali” Motevalian, “detailed the presence of mobile freezer carts, which were moved quickly by guards to waiting vans; the separate handling of bodies or coffins towards an incineration area; and the occurrence of ‘sleepers,’ or unconscious or deeply sedated prisoners, being brought into the surgery area by armed People’s Armed Police personnel.”

Another witness, Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, recapped his calculations showing that “25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic detainees” are having their organs harvested each year. Smith’s legislation addresses the challenges of dealing with a communist government not known for its devotion to human rights by imposing severe penalties on participants in the trade. The 2025 version of the bill empowers the State Department to deny passports, parole, or refugee status to any person or organization involved in any phase of the trafficking of illegal organs. It provides for the imposition of sanctions on such persons, and requires the President, within 180 days of signing the law, to supply the appropriate Congressional committees with a list of each person who “funds, sponsors, or otherwise facilitates forced organ harvesting or trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs.”

Rep. Smith notes that his first hearing on these urgent incidents, criminal in themselves and inimical to the ethically sound practice of organ donation, was some 30 years ago. Reports suggest that the years-long delay and even blockade of this legislation may at last be breaking up. Ambassador Sam Brownback, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, addressed the commission and framed the issue in the wider context of assaults on religion and human dignity. China is the leading actor in the drama — but not the only one. As he told the commission, “Disfavored religious communities are particularly targeted by the perpetrators of the forced organ harvesting scheme, with Falun Gong practitioners systematically catalogued based on biometric markers and then murdered for their organs. The organs of Uyghur Muslims are marketed to wealthy Middle Easterners as ‘halal,’ in an unimaginably cynical perversion of their Muslim faith.”

Deep as these violations go, imagine how much more depraved conditions will become as the world’s most powerful tyrants pursue their dream to rule for centuries. Of one thing there can be no doubt, large majorities in Congress are now aware of these violations — and final action may be near.