By Yan Jin and Janet Huang, Vision Times
As international scrutiny of China’s forced organ harvesting intensifies, new testimonies and research indicate that even infants and toddlers may have fallen victim to this now-industrialized death machine. What began more than two decades ago with the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners has reportedly expanded into a state-run organ trade implicating hospitals, military institutions, and senior Party elites.
Investigations now reveal a chilling new pattern: A network of medical facilities and experimental laboratories operating under the guise of “transplant innovation,” where human organs, including those taken from newborns, are allegedly extracted and trafficked for profit.
Recent statements by Hong Kong Legislative Council President Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen have reignited global attention to the issue, underscoring the urgent need for international cooperation to end what experts describe as “the darkest chapter in modern medical history.”
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China’s transplant boom
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China’s organ transplant industry began expanding rapidly in the early 2000s, shortly after the regime launched its persecution campaign against Falun Gong practitioners.
Within just a few years, the country went from performing a few thousand transplants annually to operating hundreds of hospitals capable of transplanting hearts, livers, kidneys, and corneas — a scale unmatched anywhere else in the world.
The speed of this growth defied every ethical and logistical norm. Even though China had no national organ donation system and a low voluntary donor rate, organs for surgeries were suddenly available “on demand,” sometimes within days.
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Independent investigations concluded that the only possible explanation was the existence of a vast living organ bank — composed largely of prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong adherents and other persecuted minorities such as Tibetans and Muslim Uyghurs. Medical institutions, including People’s Liberation Army (PLA) hospitals, were directly implicated in these operations. Reports from whistleblowers and medical staff describe widespread military-run facilities where organs were matched, extracted, and distributed with clockwork precision — suggesting coordination at a national level.
“It’s not random crime — it’s an industrial system,” said one former military doctor who now lives overseas. “Once you understand the logistics — the hospitals, the prisons, the transport routes — you see that the entire process is controlled like a military supply chain.”
International experts, including researchers associated with the “China Tribunal” in London, have since concluded that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to operate an extensive state-sponsored organ harvesting network that generates billions of dollars every year.
From Falun Gong to infants: an expanding victim profile
What began as the mass persecution of Falun Gong practitioners — detained, tortured, and used as living organ sources — appears to have expanded into broader categories of victims. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline rooted in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Despite being peaceful in nature, the CCP launched a large-scale suppression of the group in 1999. Since then, thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have perished at the hands of Chinese police.
Over the past decade, emerging testimonies from inside China have pointed to Uyghur detainees, underground Christians, and even minors being targeted for forced medical examinations, blood typing, and DNA sampling — procedures consistent with organ matching protocols.
Yet the most horrifying claims are those involving infants and toddlers. Reports from hospitals and insider accounts describe newborns being taken from their mothers under suspicious circumstances, with official explanations ranging from “medical complications” to “sudden infant death.”
Families were denied the chance to see the bodies, while some who managed to bribe staff were shown corpses with surgical incisions inconsistent with natural death. One source cited in overseas media said that infant organs are especially sought-after by elite clients for “longevity treatments” and experimental cell-rejuvenation therapies conducted in cooperation with military research institutes.
While these claims remain difficult to verify due to the CCP’s strict censorship, multiple converging accounts — from hospital workers, exiled medical personnel, and family testimonies — paint an increasingly grim picture.
- “The system has evolved,” said one rights investigator based in Europe.
- “In the early 2000s, it targeted adult prisoners of conscience. Now it’s younger victims, including children — the logic of supply has overtaken the last boundary of humanity.”
A thriving black market
Investigations have repeatedly shown that China’s military medical system plays a central role in the organ trade. Facilities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), particularly those attached to medical universities and regional commands, have long been identified as key nodes in what researchers call “the transplant pipeline.”
Several PLA General Hospitals and military research centers are suspected of conducting covert experiments involving fetal and infant tissue. Insiders describe a network of labs disguised as “pediatric research programs,” where data and organ samples are transferred through classified channels.
One whistleblower, a former technician who worked in a PLA-affiliated hospital in Guangzhou, told overseas media that the experiments were “conducted under military secrecy codes.” According to his account, fetuses from terminated pregnancies and newborns who died under “unexplained conditions” were used for “tissue viability studies,” which he said were, in reality, organ extraction procedures.
“They called it research,” the source said. “But everyone knew it was harvesting.”
The facilities reportedly operated under military protection, shielded from provincial inspection teams and civil oversight. Internal communications obtained by overseas investigators also suggest that these programs were part of a broader PLA initiative involving biomedical engineering and regenerative medicine — areas that conveniently overlap with China’s defense biotechnology projects.
The organ supply chain
Beyond the military hospitals, evidence points to an even darker operation — a network that sources organs through forced premature births and infant trafficking disguised as medical emergencies.
Witnesses and former hospital staff in several provinces have described a pattern in which pregnant women, often detained for “security reasons” or labeled as “unregistered,” were subjected to forced labor inductions at specific weeks of gestation. Some of these procedures reportedly occurred inside maternal care centers jointly managed by public hospitals and military research teams.
Women who resisted were told their pregnancies posed “a threat to maternal safety” or “complications to national health protocols.” Afterward, families were informed that the newborns had been “stillborn,” though no bodies were released. Several nurses later revealed that these infants were taken to secure laboratories for what official paperwork described as “post-natal medical analysis.”
“They had code words for everything,” said one former nurse from Henan Province. “A ‘Level 3 case’ meant the baby was alive but transferred. We all knew what that meant.”
Analysts believe that this system — linking maternity wards, transplant units, and military logistics — forms part of a coordinated organ procurement network operating under the state’s biomedical programs. Each link in the chain also appears to be carefully compartmentalized: Hospitals handle extraction, middlemen handle transportation, and research institutions handle data and delivery to elite clients that can afford to pay for these services.
Reports also suggest that local Party officials receive incentives for maintaining “steady supply channels,” while public security bureaus provide administrative cover by classifying deaths under “medical confidentiality.” The result is a vertically-integrated structure — from forced birth to final transplant — that functions like an industrial supply chain, with lives reduced to biological assets.
Project 981 and ‘life-extension’ research
Several whistleblower accounts and leaked internal papers point to a classified military research program known as “Project 981,” reportedly supervised by the PLA’s General Logistics Department.
The project’s stated purpose is to explore “advanced biological maintenance technologies” — a euphemism insiders interpret as “human organ and cell regeneration” experiments for China’s top political and military elites. Sources familiar with the program claim that infant and fetal organs are prized for their cellular vitality and adaptability in transplantation and rejuvenation therapies.
Internal documents even reference “ultra-young donor protocols,” in medical language that experts describe as “deliberately vague to conceal age data.”
One leaked memo obtained by overseas Chinese journalists reportedly described “sample deliveries” to exclusive medical facilities in Beijing and Shanghai, including a hospital associated with the Central Guard Bureau, which provides healthcare for senior Party officials. “It’s an ecosystem built around privilege,” said a researcher based in Taiwan who has studied Project 981 for years. “The higher one’s position in the Party’s hierarchy, the greater their access to these experimental treatments. It’s a closed loop of political power feeding on biological resources.”
Experts note that the scale and secrecy of “Project 981” suggest direct political authorization. The overlap between defense biotechnology, elite healthcare, and transplant logistics indicates that the program may operate as a national-level life-extension initiative — a fusion of medicine and authoritarian control.
While the CCP publicly denies such allegations, its refusal to allow independent inspections of transplant facilities continues to fuel international suspicion.
Calls for accountability
The global response to China’s organ harvesting practices has grown increasingly urgent. Human rights organizations, medical activists, and independent researchers continue to call for criminal accountability at the highest levels of the CCP.
This comes after a recent hot mic incident involving Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — in which Xi was overheard discussing China’s biomedical advantage. “Few people lived to 70 in the past,” Xi said through a Russian translator. “But these days, at 70, you are still considered a child.”
In Hong Kong, Legislative Council President Andrew Leung Kwan-yuen made remarks acknowledging that reports of organ trafficking and transplant abuse have “damaged China’s international reputation.” Leung’s statement, though carefully-worded but firm, signaled a potential shift in Hong Kong’s approach to human rights issues under Beijing’s oversight. Observers note that Kwan-yuen’s comments, made in an official capacity, represent one of the few instances where a sitting Hong Kong official has publicly addressed the issue.
Meanwhile, international advocacy groups are urging the United Nations Human Rights Council to open an independent inquiry into forced organ harvesting of minors and prisoners of conscience within China. Lawmakers in the U.S., Canada, and the European Union (EU) have also renewed calls for sanctions against Chinese hospitals and research institutions implicated in the practice.
“This is not a medical issue — it’s a crime against humanity,” said one British human rights lawyer involved in the China Tribunal’s 2019 judgment. “The world can no longer look away. Every child, every prisoner used in this system represents a human life treated as disposable inventory.”
