CALGARY—The Chinese Communist Party undermines national unity in Canada through psyop operations that sow division, Jan Jekielek, host of the Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, told a Calgary conference on Sept. 21.
“They want to see two sides that are so radicalized that they have to fight each other,” Jekielek said at the 2025 Reclaiming Conference organized by the grassroots group We Unify and held from Sept. 19–21.
“I hope that we can, at a grassroots level, educate ourselves about what a totalitarian regime like communist China is capable of, and understand that it seeks to subvert the society and guard ourselves.”
Jan Jekielek, a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of the American Thought Leaders program, speaks at the 2025 Reclaiming Conference organized by We Unify in Calgary, on Sept. 21, 2025. Omid Ghoreishi/The Epoch Times
Jekielek said that one way the Chinese regime achieves this is with the use of social media platforms, especially those it controlled by the regime, to create division. He said Canadians should counteract these efforts by showing compassion and engaging in dialogue with those who have a different opinion.
Referring to the recent assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, Jekielek said Kirk was an example of someone who always reached out to the other side effectively.
“He viewed them as people that could be talked to, could be convinced, and that heart is actually what helped shift people,” he said.
CCP’s Domestic ‘Enemy’
The strategy of causing division to crush unity has been used by all communist regimes as a way to consolidate their control domestically, Jekielek said, adding that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is no exception. He said the CCP always needs an “enemy” to justify its existence as the controlling regime.
“In 1989, it was students looking for democracy. That movement was crushed. In 1999, there was a spiritual movement called Falun Gong that became widely popular, an extremely grassroots movement, I might add, which is very relevant to the discussions we’re having today,” he said.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance that was introduced to the public in 1992. It spread rapidly within a few years in China, and around 70 to 100 million people were practising it by 1999, according to government statistics. However, such popularity wasn’t tolerated by the CCP leadership, who wanted to be in control of all facets of society, according to the Falun Dafa Information Centre. In July 1999, the regime launched a highly organized and well-funded campaign to persecute Falun Gong, which has resulted in the captivity, torture, killing, and even live organ harvesting of the discipline’s practitioners, according to the centre.
“They are not willing to give up their faith, and they end up in prisons. They end up being tortured, in some cases to death,” Jekielek said.
“So people are disappearing, an incredibly vulnerable population, and that’s exactly when this transplant industry exploded in communist China, where people from all over the world, if they had the cash, could go [and get an organ transplant].”
Understanding CCP’s Threat
Jekielek said the West for years “vastly misunderstood” China, thinking that if it engaged with Beijing in various ways such as commerce it could change the totalitarian regime.
“It convinced us that … they can change if we put enough money there, if we engage enough, we invest enough, if we share our legal system—all of those things, with never any intention of actually doing that, because in that system, the Chinese Communist Party is always supreme,” he said.
He added that today, it should be understood that from an external perspective, China is the number-one threat to Western countries like Canada.
“I hope that we can, at a grassroots level, educate ourselves about what a totalitarian regime like communist China is capable of, and understand that it seeks to subvert the society, and guard ourselves,” he said.
“And we could do this at a grassroots level, talking to each other, understanding this face of that kind of evil as this organ harvesting. I think that’s the way that we can actually guard our future and reclaim our future, or a piece of it.”
The three-day Reclaiming Conference, which according to the organizers is a “grassroots conservative leaning leadership conference,” featured a number of speakers who spoke on the themes of freedom and other topics.
