Forced Organ Harvesting Issue Key to Shifting US Understanding of CCP, Says Killed to Order Author

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) practice of forced organ harvesting is a lens through which Americans can come to understand the true nature of the CCP and how it engages with the United States and international community, according to Jan Jekielek, author of the new book “Killed to Order.”Jekielek, senior editor and Washington bureau chief at The Epoch Times, sat down at the Hudson Institute with Nina Shea, director of the think tank’s Center for Religious Freedom, to discuss on March 18 evidence of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting and how the regime expands complicity.In the book, Jekielek discusses how the United States poured money and support into China beginning in the 1970s, believing that industry would be a liberalizing force, and how that belief would unravel only decades later.The book also reveals how the CCP began its practice of harvesting organs from unwilling prisoners as early as the 1980s, subsequently building up China’s transplantation expertise and expanding medical experimentation on political prisoners.“The very moment when we were introducing them to the World Trade Organization, giving them [Most Favored Nation] status, this was going on, the organ harvesting was getting off the ground,” Shea said.Sudden Growth in TransplantsJekielek and Shea noted that the Chinese organ transplant expertise and industry were built up with support from U.S. institutions—an issue that government bodies are increasingly concerned about.In 2025, lawmakers drew attention to how elite U.S. universities train and collaborate with Chinese transplant surgeons on research, and the Department of Health and Human Services called on institutions to cease cooperation with the Chinese organ transplant system.“There have been documented 300 names from their own websites, Chinese transplant surgeons who … received their medical training in the United States. And this goes on today,” Shea said. “It’s a combination of too bad to be believed, beyond belief, and the deceptive practices of the CCP.”Jekielek said that an ethical transplantation is usually the result of an accident, which is why recipients remain on waitlists for months or years.“In a civilized, ethical procurement scenario, someone has to have a catastrophic accident. It’s typically a motorcycle accident or a car accident. They have to be not coming back,” Jekielek said.“You can’t transplant most organs, aside from corneas, from a completely dead body. There has to be some circulation.“And the blood type, tissue type, all that has to match you.”Yet Chinese hospitals were advertising two-week wait times in the 2000s, and scheduling transplant surgeries for specific dates. As explained in Jekielek’s book, the only way to schedule an organ transplant is to guarantee when the donor is going to die.This is only possible because the CCP has incarcerated a large population of people from whom they’ve stripped all rights.Jekielek said his own investigation into the issue began when he was doing humanitarian work decades ago, and met a Falun Gong practitioner who experienced the CCP’s persecution before escaping China.Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It quickly spread by word of mouth in China to reach an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the 1990s before the CCP banned it overnight in 1999.“This was a pivotal moment for me in getting involved, as I met a woman who … literally refused to give up her faith, sign a piece of paper, a waiver that would say that. And they were torturing her,” Jekielek said.“In communist China, they were killing people for refusing to give up their faith, the most fundamental right we have. It was very clear to me at that point that this is not a liberalizing society.“I had these amazing stories, really heroic actions, of these Falun Gong practitioners who had braved everything to expose the truth, to get out, to escape, and, like, zero media wanted to touch it, because it didn’t fit the narrative.”Reports of Falun Gong practitioners being illegally detained, tortured, and subjected to brainwashing that the CCP terms “reeducation” emerged after mass arrests in 1999.“If you can imagine what it would look like to suddenly have a whole large group of people incarcerated, because it turns out that they’re not easily being ’reeducated.’ They’re not all signing these waivers,” he said.“And then there are rules in this massive incarceration system of China that say … ‘all Falun Gong practitioner deaths will be considered suicides’ … just basically, ’if they die while you’re trying to break them, that’s fine.’”He continued: “You have this incredibly vulnerable population, one they’ve been dehumanized in the eyes of their fellows through this massive propaganda, kind of straight out of 1930s Germany. … And now you have them incarcerated. Now you can blood type them, you can tissue type them. You can organ scan them. Now you have a database of their vitals.”The result was that organ transplants suddenly increased in China, a country that had no voluntary organ donation program.“There’s this low level of transplantation happening in the year 2000, just as the Falun Gong persecution begins. But then it grows geometrically, and by 2005 there’s a plateau, and by around 2010 we get 146 hospitals that are doing this transplantation,” Jekielek noted.Shea said the CCP had turned the vulnerable population into a “living organ bank” and went to great lengths to deny, slander, dismiss, and silence whistleblowers and investigators.“It’s really a perfect crime, because these are people in prison. They’re incommunicado. They’re isolated. There’s no witnesses except different compartmentalized people who take them to be slaughtered, take the organs to the hospital, to the doctor … so not anybody knows the whole story,” she said.Chinese Medical Studies Expose ‘Executions’Jekielek pointed out that forced organ harvesting has become such a big industry in China that its medical community is largely “desensitized” to it.“In China, there’s this machine of death that they’ve created over decades,” he said.The result is that Chinese doctors and researchers, in many cases, treat the killing of a live, involuntary donor during transplantation as the norm, Jekielek said, pointing to a 2022 paper published in the American Journal of Transplantation.The researchers scanned nearly 3,000 Chinese medical papers that involved organ transplantation, before reviewing around 300 of the papers that included language suggesting the dead donor rule was breached.“We find evidence in 71 of these reports, spread nationwide, that brain death could not have properly been declared. In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death,” the abstract reads.“Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People’s Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.”When Evil Rises to the TopShea said this idea of monetized religious persecution spoke to the nature of the regime.Jekielek explained that studies of communist societies show that people with “characteristics of evil or are able to do evil without any remorse” are rewarded and promoted, whereas in a typical society these traits tend to be shunned, prosecuted, or hidden.“In communist societies, they’re actually elevated … one reason you always get the gulag or something like it,” he said, adding that as a result, there is a “disproportionate” number of people who display psychopathic traits in the upper levels of communist societies.Another characteristic of communist societies is that the “greatest good is the survival and supremacy of the Communist Party, always,” he said.“That’s why, in every single communist society, you get atrocity,” Jekielek added. “Because the bottom line is, it’s that supremacy that matters. It’s the survival that matters. And if you have to break a few eggs along the way, this is like the kind of the apotheosis, the extreme of utilitarian bioethics, of utilitarianism.“They instrumentalize absolutely everything—human life, allies, so-called allies. I mean, you name it. It’s this very sort of cold, empty, cynical view of humanity … struggle and force and coercion and power—these are only the things that matter, ultimately.”