A screening of the documentary State Organs was held this week at the City of Albany Town Hall. The film examines the Chinese Communist Party’s harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience, particularly practitioners of Falun Gong.
The screening was not unconnected to Albany. Until September 2024 the City maintained a civic affiliation with Linyi in Shandong Province. Hospitals in that province were identified in the original Kilgour–Matas investigation as sites where organs from Falun Gong prisoners were made available. I moved a motion to end the affiliation in July 2023. It failed 9-3. Fourteen months later I moved it again. It passed 10-1.
During the panel discussion that followed the screening, an audience member asked a question that comes up often in conversations like this: how could doctors — people who take the Hippocratic Oath — participate in something like that?
I work in emergency medicine. I have worked alongside doctors of every temperament and disposition. I told the audience what I believe to be true: that the doctors who harvest organs from prisoners in China are not a different species from the doctors who work in Australian hospitals. They are not uniquely evil. They are ordinary.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed that the line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart. Doctors are not exempt. Medical training does not confer moral immunity. Neither does an oath. Evil is interior to the human person. But systems determine how much room it gets.
Falun Gong is a spiritual movement combining meditation with moral teachings centred on truthfulness, compassion, and the pursuit of virtue. Since the late 1990s the Chinese Communist Party has treated the movement as a political threat. Practitioners have been detained in large numbers and subjected to systematic persecution, including the forced extraction of their organs.
In 2019 the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC — who served as lead prosecutor at the trial of Slobodan Milošević — concluded unanimously and beyond reasonable doubt that forced organ harvesting had been committed throughout China on a significant scale. Falun Gong practitioners were identified as the principal source of organs. The Tribunal found that crimes against humanity had been committed. The Chinese government was invited to participate and declined.
In May 2025, the United States House of Representatives passed the Falun Gong Protection Act unanimously. The bill mandates sanctions against individuals involved in forced organ harvesting and is now before the Senate.
I do not pretend to be an expert on Falun Gong theology. But spend any time with a practitioner and it becomes clear that it rests on the conviction that human beings possess spiritual significance and moral worth. That alone places it in direct tension with a political system that regards people as instruments of the state.
Toward the end of the film, the Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas makes a point worth sitting with. The problem, he argues, is not uniquely Chinese. It is a problem inherent to communist systems.
He is right. Communism rejects the premise that human beings possess value independent of the state. Once that premise goes, people can be reclassified — as useful, burdensome, productive, disposable. Organs become resources. Prisoners become inventory.
In the Western tradition, the constraint against this has historically rested on the idea of Imago Dei — that human beings possess inherent dignity because they are made in the image of God. Their value does not depend on productivity, utility, or the requirements of any political programme. It is not granted by the state, and it cannot be revoked by the state.
Most people in the West no longer know the phrase. But they still live inside the civilisational architecture it built. I work inside it every shift. The question that stays with me after the film screening is not whether what happened in China could happen here. It is what, exactly, we think is preventing it.
The answer the audience member was looking for is not complicated. Doctors are not morally different from anyone else. To expect otherwise is to misunderstand human nature.