‘When I first heard about it, I didn’t want to believe it. I just felt revulsion,’ Jekielek said.
For more than 20 years, what has been done to counter the Chinese communist regime’s industrial-scale practice of forced organ harvesting from living prisoners of conscience has remained limited and mostly in independent capacities.
Experts have said this is due, in part, to the crime’s unbelievable nature and the sheer volume of piecemeal evidence.
“When I first heard about it, I didn’t want to believe it. I just felt revulsion,” Jan Jekielek said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” where he took the interviewee’s seat for the first time with guest host Rob Schneider.
“I already knew what the Chinese Communist Party was capable of, broadly, but I didn’t want to accept that this could be happening, because it’s so extreme,” Jekielek said.
On March 17, Jekielek’s book “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary” launches, pulling together the most compelling evidence amassed over the better part of 20 years to expose a crime that continues to grow.
What began as a project to extend Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites’ lifespans took a sinister turn after then-CCP dictator Jiang Zemin ordered the “eradication” of a peaceful spiritual practice that one in 13 Chinese people had taken up by the late 1990s, as explained in “Killed to Order.”
Suddenly, a regime with no moral limits, already accused of funding unethical medical experimentation, had at its disposal likely millions of incarcerated prisoners of conscience.
Spike in Chinese Transplants
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered around the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. Jekielek, a Falun Gong practitioner himself, outlines in his book the circumstances in which the practice rose to popularity in China and the subsequent persecution in which the CCP branded practitioners enemies of the state overnight.
In the early 2000s, reports emerged from Falun Gong practitioners claiming they had received unknown injections and undergone blood tests while imprisoned for their faith, but they did not know the purpose.
It was not until a whistleblower in 2006 disclosed that her ex-husband, a surgeon, admitted to transplanting some 2,000 corneas from live prisoners of conscience that led independent investigations to the source of the spike in Chinese organ transplants: Falun Gong practitioners.
“I remember in 2005, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, there was the Special Rapporteur on torture. His name was Manfred Nowak. He estimated that half of all the people in the entire system [incarcerated in China] were Falun Gong practitioners,” Jekielek said.
“They built this on the backs of the Falun Gong, starting in 2000. The whole Chinese transplant industry grows geometrically from 2000 to 2005.
“By the end of the 2000s, we’ve got [60,000] to 90,000 transplants a year being done. That’s the best estimate, that’s the range. It’s very hard to estimate: This is a state secret. They don’t have statistics. They pretend it’s not happening.”
For comparison, Jekielek said, the United States hit a record number of organ transplants in 2024 at 48,149.
There are indications that, as China has grown its transplant industry and expertise, unethical organ transplantation and organ harvesting are targeting people beyond Falun Gong practitioners.
One example is the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, which is already undergoing what the United States has designated a genocide, as the CCP systemically erases Uyghur culture.
“I hate even saying this, but there actually is a global market for what they call ‘Halal organs,’” Jekielek said.
Industrial Scale System
Schneider and Jekielek compared the scale of the CCP’s organ harvesting system to the Holocaust, noting that before the surgeon picks up the scalpel, thousands of people have to be involved in order to perpetuate this crime on a state scale.
said. “There’s a lot of people that need to participate in order to achieve an organ transplantation situation.”
Schneider expressed disbelief that this program has managed to survive up to the present.
“This being exposed is the only chance we have to stop this and save these Uyghurs and Falun Gong members from this continual involuntary organ transplantation and the murder of a massive, massive amount of human beings,” Schneider said. “I think it’s one of the great evils ever.
“The requiring of somebody’s death for your survival, to me, is the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard in medicine.
“This abuse, with killing on demand, kill to order, is something that is unique in the history of humanity.”
“Killed to Order” launches March 17. It is currently available for pre-order.
