A new book exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long practice of forced organ harvesting from religious believers has hit the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.
The CCP’s forced organ harvesting is an issue author Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times and host of “American Thought Leaders” on EpochTV, has covered for 20 years, and the book distills the most compelling evidence from two decades of independent investigations, testimonies, and firsthand experience.
Twenty years ago, this was a topic people tuned out and turned away from, according to Jekielek. That’s changed—as evidenced by the thousands who have already bought “Killed to Order,” and the momentum to combat forced organ harvesting that Jekielek has seen in recent book events.
“The time is now. We’re in this time now where people can accept this, and we can actually effect change,” Jekielek told The Epoch Times. “People are ready to accept it, and I think policymakers are ready to tackle it, because it’s not just ... the Chinese people in the crosshairs, it’s ourselves. We’re complicit in this, and we have to stop at least that part. ... There’s a will for that now.”
“It’s at every level,” he said. “It’s a very special time in history for this issue, and this book is a testament to this.
“It’s astonishing, it’s almost hard to believe, but it’s unbelievably welcome and kind of what we’ve been hoping for, those of us that work on this issue, that [we] finally could create societal momentum to end this horrific practice—‘an evil yet to be seen on this planet,’ as David Matas has called it,” Jekielek said, referring to the human rights lawyer who coauthored the 2006 report laying out 17 lines of evidence that the CCP was harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners at scale.
As multiple investigations and a 2019 China Tribunal found, practitioners of Falun Gong were the primary victims of the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting system.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that teaches the three principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Introduced to the Chinese public in the early 1990s, it spread widely through word of mouth, and an estimated 70 million to 100 million people were practicing Falun Gong by the end of the decade.
Then, on July 20, 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin ordered a violent persecution of Falun Gong, resulting in mass illegal detention of practitioners overnight.
As recounted in “Killed to Order,” Chinese organ transplants subsequently exploded. Numbers began to climb in 2000, in a country with no organ donation system.
The first half of the book exposes the scale of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting system, and how it works.
The second half explains how the CCP made the West complicit over the past three decades. For example, even today the United States trains Chinese transplant surgeons, and provides transplant technology and anti-rejection drugs for patients.
But Jekielek and other human rights advocates say that the conversation has changed, as more Americans recognize the CCP for what it is and oppose the treatment of a China ruled by the regime as a normal trade partner.
“‘Killed to Order’ [is] a very deeply important and disturbing work that exposes one of the greatest human rights abuses of our time,” said Mary Vigil, senior adviser of national security and foreign policy to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who has introduced several pieces of legislation to combat forced organ harvesting and end U.S. financial support for it.
“Every year under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, tens of thousands of innocent people, many in the prime of their lives, are killed for their organs. These are prisoners of conscience: Uyghurs, who are victims of an ongoing genocide, and Falun Gong practitioners,” Vigil said.
Sam Brownback, former ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said “Killed to Order” exposes the CCP in a way that will push the American people to make a moral decision.
“This isn’t just inhumane, it’s inhuman,” he said of forced organ harvesting at a March 24 Remembrance Society event in Washington.
“You’ve got to show it for what it is. This level of evil is stunning. The Red Dragon has brought evil to a peaceful people, and that must end. It ends by the world arising against the moral depravity, against the moral depravity. It ends by awareness to the cruel evils deployed by Beijing against its own people, which this book exposes. ... It ends by our saying no to CCP global leadership.”
