Sen. Rubio Introduces Bills to Counter CCP Influence, Stop Forced Organ Harvesting

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced three pieces of legislation this week aimed at countering Communist China’s influence in the United States and protecting Chinese citizens from the CCP’s oppression.

The Falun Gong Protection Act would sanction those responsible for, or who are complicit in, the forced harvesting of organs and require a report from the U.S. Department of State on China’s organ transplant regime. The Stop CCP Act would directly sanction members of the Chinese Communist Party and their adult family members who are involved in acts of aggression, oppression, and human rights abuses. UN Special Rapporteur funding prohibition would stop U.S. taxpayer money from funding the “Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights” position within the United Nations.

These bills build on the groundbreaking research of VOC’s China Studies team. Led by Dr. Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar of Xinjiang and Tibet, our China team exposes Beijing’s human rights violations, propaganda, and global influence. VOC’s China research covers:

FORCED ORGAN HARVESTING In April 2022, VOC’s data scientist Matthew Robertson published groundbreaking research in the world’s leading transplant journal, using China’s own medical papers to demonstrate the atrocity of forced organ harvesting, a state-sponsored scheme whereby for decades, thousands of innocent people have been killed on demand for their organs. The paper prompted the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) to hold a special hearing on the topic at which two VOC experts testified, informed the Stop Organ Harvesting Act in U.S. Congress, and led the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation to ban clinical submissions from doctors in China until Beijing verifiably reforms its organ transplant system to align with ethical norms.

FORCED LABOR In 2019, Dr. Adrian Zenz published the first research report exposing Xinjiang’s forced labor schemes. His subsequent testimony to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) about forced labor was instrumental in the development of the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). In December 2020, Dr. Zenz published research demonstrating, for the first time, that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities were being forced to pick cotton by hand in Xinjiang. This led the U.S. to ban imports of Xinjiang cotton and tomatoes, galvanized global attention on the Uyghur forced labor situation, and sparked a chain of events that eventually led the European Union to suspend negotiations with Beijing over planned EU-China investments.

MASS INTERNMENT In 2018, Dr. Zenz was the first scholar to expose Xinjiang’s network of re-education camps. In May 2022, VOC published analysis of the Xinjiang Police Files, a trove of documents, images, and confidential speeches hacked by an anonymous third party from internal police computers in China’s Xinjiang region, that proved the prison-like nature of Beijing’s re-education camps and the direct involvement by top Chinese leaders in the mass internment campaign. The Files were released in collaboration with a media consortium of 14 leading outlets including the BBC and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. This became the most widely read news story on Xinjiang in history. The release led to statements from six Western governments, and a European Parliament resolution condemning the CCP’s policies in Xinjiang as “crimes against humanity” and as constituting a risk of genocide.

BIRTH SUPPRESSION VOC’s seminal work demonstrating targeted suppression of Uyghur birth rates through forced sterilization of Uyghur women became the core evidence supporting the US government’s official genocide determinations on Xinjiang. Our research enabled similar resolutions by 10 other legislatures, and the London-based Uyghur Tribunal’s determination that the Xinjiang atrocities amount to genocide.

IMPROVE GLOBAL STANDARDS In November 2023, Dr. Adrian Zenz published the first academic analysis of the International Labor Organisation (ILO)’s efforts to measure forced labor, identifying a significant “Xinjiang blindspot” in standard forced labor metrics, causing the ILO to update its measurement standards to better capture state-imposed forced labor worldwide.

DATA SCIENCE In February 2023, VOC released the Xinjiang Person Search Tool, allowing Uyghurs and the public to search over 700,000 personnel records from the hacked Xinjiang Police Files for information about their loved ones in captivity. The tool garnered primetime news coverage on CNN, and has since led to multiple media reports featuring stories of Uyghurs who learned of their relatives’ status from VOC’s search tool.