by WorldTribune Staff, September 9, 2025 Real World News
During the massive military parade in Beijing on Sept. 3, Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and invited guest Vladimir Putin were overheard discussing advances in medicine that will extend life expectancy with a focus on organ transplants.
“Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi said through a translator in Russian as he walked together to a dais with Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Both Xi and Putin are 72. It’s not known if the conversation was translated for Kim, believed to be age 41.
Putin then noted the life-extending advances in transplanting human organs: “In a few decades, as biotechnology continues to develop, human organs will continue to be transplanted and people will become younger and perhaps even achieve immortality,” he said, speaking through an interpreter in Mandarin.
The conversation shined a light on China’s practice of harvesting organs from dissidents and prisoners, The Washington Times reported on Sept. 4.
Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary magazine, said the Xi-Putin exchange exposes the danger posed by the two leaders.
“It sounds like a joke and lends itself to easy mockery about Putin and Xi being evil, power-crazed maniacs,” he in a post online. “But the thing is — that’s kind of what they are. And the hot-mic moment provides a clear window into their dangerous grandiosity.”
After hearing the Xi-Putin chit chat, New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, called on the Senate to act on legislation he drafted targeting China’s practice of forced organ harvesting.
Under the pending legislation, anyone involved in illegal organ harvesting – brokers, suppliers, or recipient patients — would face 20 years in prison along with civil penalties, Smith said. “This is a gross, gross violation of human rights.”
In the Senate, Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, has supported bills targeting forced organ harvesting.
“There is growing evidence that the Chinese Communist Party has and continues to harvest organs from persecuted religious groups, prisoners of conscience, and inmates,” Cotton said in 2023.
The House bill is currently awaiting action before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Smith said the Xi-Putin conversation has generated new support for his bill that he said has the backing of the White House. The bill is called the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025.
According to a report by an international tribunal of human rights experts, China is charged with “acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of medieval torturers and executioners.”
Based on reports, thousands of innocent people have been killed as their bodies cut open while they were alive to harvest kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea, and skin and sold to transplant recipients.
Testimony from a Chinese doctor who took part in forced surgeries said in one case a victim was still conscious while organs were removed.
“I mean, this is really right out of Nazi Germany, Josef Mengele, it really is,” Rep. Smith said.
Organs are also taken from Muslim Uyghurs in western China and then sold to Middle Eastern countries where Muslims purchase organs from other Muslims, he said.
In July, the online publication The Diplomat reported that China was building six new facilities for organ transplants in Xinjiang, populated mostly by Uyghurs.
“This massive expansion in Xinjiang — a region already under scrutiny for systematic repression — raises deeply troubling questions about where the organs will come from,” said Wendy Rogers, distinguished professor of Clinical Ethics and chair of the International Advisory Board of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.
