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American Thought Leaders

Why 28- and 29-Year-Olds Are Disappearing From China’s Uyghur Concentration Camps | Ethan Gutmann

American Thought Leaders

The Epoch Times

Politics, Government, News

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2026

⏱️ 59 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For two decades, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann has been researching how the Chinese Communist Party secretly harvests the organs of prisoners of conscience and kills them in the process.

He authored the groundbreaking 2014 work “The Slaughter” and, more recently, “The Xinjiang Procedure.”

In his latest book, he gathers evidence of how the regime—which has long targeted Falun Gong practitioners for their organs—is now exploiting captive Uyghurs for this same macabre industry.

Gutmann traveled to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey to interview dozens of Uyghurs and Kazaks who had managed to escape after being imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang, China, also known as East Turkestan. Many spoke to him at great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones.

What they revealed to him was nothing short of horrific.

A central witness named “Samal” described working in one of four medical labs located several stories below the concentration camp. One of the clinics—the one she worked in—was used for intestinal removal.

“The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn’t see them, but occasionally the door would open. You‘d see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there … there’d be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20,” Gutmann said.

During his research, Gutmann realized a disturbing pattern. Many of those who disappeared in the middle of the night from the camps were typically 28 or 29 years old.

He believes the CCP has made this age demographic its primary target for forced organ harvesting.

“You are at the peak of your health. At that point, your organs have stopped growing,” Gutmann says.

In this episode, he breaks down the devastating evidence he’s uncovered—and the failure of Western institutions to address these crimes.

The spread of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) technology—which keeps organs oxygenated and viable for many hours—has made the CCP’s organ trade even more lucrative than before.

“Suddenly,” he told me, “you can pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them to distribute them around. And so the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from $100,000 up to almost a million dollars, if they were selling to foreigners.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

A woman named Samar, she describes a series of medical labs below a concentration camp.

0:07.0

Four stories down, every day that she worked there, there'd be eight or nine bodies.

0:11.0

Sometimes it was as many as 20, almost always young.

0:15.0

What this woman described is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger system,

0:20.0

according to investigative journalist

0:21.9

Ethan Gutman, who has been researching forced organ harvesting in China for nearly two decades.

0:27.7

He's the author of The Slaughter, and more recently, the Xinjiang procedure.

0:32.9

Gutman says one of the most disturbing patterns he uncovered is the 28 rule.

0:37.5

28-year-olds, 29-year-olds. These are people at the peak of their health.

0:41.3

A system where people are selected, taken, and process.

0:45.1

And they disappear in the middle of the night. It's like a car that's about to go out the assembly line.

0:49.9

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck. Ethan Gutman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

1:05.0

It's great to be here.

1:07.0

In your work on the Xinjiang procedure, on the forced organ harvesting aspect,

1:11.8

because you cover a lot of ground in there,

1:14.3

what would you say was the single most shocking thing that you came across,

1:18.6

that was most shocking to you in your work?

1:21.5

We talk about victims a lot in organ harvesting, and that's appropriate.

1:25.4

We should be.

1:26.7

But the truth is, the strongest witness

1:29.3

that you can come up with is somebody from the medical world who performs some sort of surgery

1:37.3

or is in some way tangentially involved in this nexus of organ harvesting. And in this case, the final witness in the sort of central chapter, the sort of beating

...

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