US Congress Should Recognize Genocide Against Tibetans, Falun Gong Adherents: Expert

Some of the more than 700 transplant hospitals across China. The image in the centre shows doctors carrying fresh organs for transplant at a hospital in Henan Province on Aug. 16, 2012. (The Epoch Times)

The U.S. Congress should label the crimes the CCP commits against Falun Gong adherents and Tibetans as genocide, according to Anders Corr, publisher of the Journal of Political Risk and columnist for The Epoch Times.

“The U.S. Congress and the U.S. State Department have already recognized the genocide of the Uyghurs; we need to acknowledge the genocide against the Falun Gong and Tibetans as well,” Corr recently told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of the Epoch Times.

In 2021, the Trump and Biden administrations formally declared China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority ethnic group as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.” Several countries have followed suit, including Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and the Netherlands.

Corr said that Tibet has long been subjected to genocidal policies by Beijing, with people there undergoing mandatory DNA testing.

“Eighty percent of the children are now forced to be in state-controlled boarding schools away from their parents and grandparents, which makes them alienated from their own families over time; they’re losing their language. They’re unable to communicate well with their grandparents, who only know Tibetan. They’re being taught Mandarin Chinese; they’re being taught Chinese Communist Party propaganda,” he said.

He singled out the Tibet government-in-exile’s estimate that 1.2 million Tibetans died due to China’s repression of dissent.

“So all of these are forms when looked at together under the United Nations definition, these are considered to be genocide,” he added.

Genocide of Falun Gong Adherents

Meanwhile, Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline with meditative exercises and moral teachings. It grew in popularity during the 1990s, leading to up to 100 million people practicing in China by the decade’s end. Perceiving this to be a threat, the Chinese regime in 1999 launched a nationwide campaign seeking to eradicate the practice.

Millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained in jails and detention facilities across the country, where they are subjected to torture and forced organ harvesting.

Seeing the practice’s popularity as a threat to its rule, the Chinese regime launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice in July 1999, targeting innocents in a violent, deadly suppression that experts have described as genocide.

Dr. Torsten Trey, who founded the nonprofit group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, has called the abuse inflicted on Falun Gong practitioners a form of “cold genocide,” or the “destruction of a group that takes place but in a slow motion and slow-moving pattern.”

“Genocide can happen against a religion; it can happen against an ethnicity or race. There are many categories protected in the UN Genocide Convention. And the Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and Tibetans are all members of the protected identities. I think we need to start recognizing that these genocides are happening,” Corr noted.

Following recognition of the persecution of the practice as genocide, Corr said that the United States might impose sanctions on Beijing and encourage other like-minded countries, including the UK and Canada, to follow suit.

“As soon as you start calling something ‘genocide,’ I think the business community wakes up a little bit more than they would have. They might stop putting as much investment in China; of course, that investment empowers China to do these bad things,” he said.

Combating Forced Organ Harvesting

He pointed to Thermo Fisher, based in Massachusetts, allegedly selling DNA test kits to the Tibetan police.

“And the Tibetan police are using the DNA kits along with [the] rest of the security services in Tibet to take DNA from people or from children without their consent,” he said.

“And then, according to some experts that spoke in Congress, they are using those DNA tests to match people for organ donation and forced organ harvesting,” he said, seemingly referencing Dr. Howard Monsour, previous medical director of the liver transplant program at the University of Texas Houston and former chief of hepatology at Methodist Hospital, who testified before Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee on March 29.

Monsour told the committee that he learned about the malpractice from his doctoral student from China. Corr called the action “shocking and reprehensible to the highest degree.”

He urged Congress to pass a law targeting U.S. corporations providing equipment that might be used for forced organ harvesting.

“And it wouldn’t only be equipment to Tibet, it would be the equivalent to all of China and including Hong Kong and Macau because things that are export controlled to China often get imported via Hong Kong and sent over to whoever really needs it in mainland China. So we have to stop these economic sanctions and export controls on a particular company in China and broaden it out to all of China, including Hong Kong and Macau,” Corr said.

The House of Representatives on March 27 overwhelmingly passed a bill punishing communist China for its forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, marking the first non-symbolic legislative measure in the United States to counter the atrocity.

H.R. 1154, dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, passed by a vote of 413–2. It would sanction anyone involved in the act and require annual government reporting on such activities taking place in foreign countries.

Jana J. Pruet and Eva Fu contributed to this report.