In March 2006, the "Falun Gong" cult began fabricating and disseminating rumors about the Chinese government "harvesting" organs from its practitioners. Ever since, the US Congress and some other official and unofficial Western organizations have repeatedly claimed that organs are removed from "prisoners of conscience" in China without their consent.

In 2006, David Kilgour, then Canada's secretary of state for Asia-Pacific affairs, co-authored a report, accusing China of extracting body organs from "prisoners of conscience" and "political prisoners", which damaged China's image in the West.

However, in March of the same year, the US embassy in China sent personnel to the so-called Sujiatun concentration camp in Shenyang, Liaoning province in Northeast China, to investigate allegations of organ harvesting from "Falun Gong" members, and found no evidence of it.