An Israeli doctor recounts with horror how a patient of his scheduled a heart transplant in China on a two-week timeline. A Chinese doctor for the elite details how he procured eight kidneys in short order to find the perfect match for a particular client seeking a transplant. A data scientist discovers that transplant numbers published by Chinese institutions have been falsified at a national scale.
Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has worked for years to try to discredit allegations of forced organ harvesting, 20 years of evidence point to a system where innocents under the regime are killed to order, and countries such as the United States are being coerced into silence or complicity.
“We train those surgeons in significant number. We provide all sorts of solutions and technology. We fund some of those hospitals that are involved in forced organ harvesting. You have partnerships between research institutions,” he added. “The national security implications are massive.”
CCP Dehumanizes Targets
How did the CCP build out a system where anyone around the world can pay six figures and receive a new heart in two weeks when wait times are usually counted in years?
“You have to have someone that matches you, so it has to be a catastrophic accident, the size of the organ has to be right, the blood type, the tissue has to match. That’s why people wait years in a civilized society for this to work,” Jekielek said. But in China? “Two weeks and they’ve got the person ready to be killed to order.”
Ethical organ transplantation regards donation as an altruistic act: A person officially consents to donating their organs after death for nothing in return, in an effort to greatly benefit another who is critically ill. Medical advances now also enable organ donation from living donors, which comes at a risk to the donor.
A black market exists wherein organs are sold and trafficked, but the CCP’s organ harvesting is beyond that. It is a state-backed enterprise intertwined with multiple industries and networked into the medical ecosystems of other countries, as explained in “Killed to Order.”
“You need to have something like a state actor. It’s a very unique situation, because you have to be able to push coercive power through into a population,” Jekielek said.
The system requires a force like a totalitarian state able to “propagandize a population heavily,” in effect dehumanizing an entire group of people. It also needs to have “the power to incarcerate a huge group,” Jekielek said.
The CCP achieved this in the early 2000s, after it had incarcerated large numbers of prisoners of conscience: Falun Gong practitioners.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a peaceful spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition that centers on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. It was introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s and by the end of the decade, official state estimates counted around 1 in 13 Chinese practicing Falun Gong.
Then on July 20, 1999, the CCP carried out nationwide arrests of Falun Gong practitioners as it launched a violent persecution against the practice.
“It was very grassroots, very different than very hierarchical communist structures, and the dictator at the time, Jiang Zemin, decided, to use his words, ‘eradicate it,’” Jekielek said. “So a group of people practicing truthfulness, compassion, forbearance were suddenly on the most wanted list. To justify this, [the CCP] pushed mass propaganda into the population ... and you have this dehumanization situation now, and this mass incarceration.”
Jekielek added that the CCP, as with all communist regimes, has a history of designating an external enemy—the United States—as well as internal enemies in order to cement its hold on power.
“Sometimes it was the landowners, when they wanted to steal the land ... sometimes it was the students and the student movement of ‘89,” he said.
“Why does it become a vulnerable group? ... There’s two purposes of this: One is because they want to somehow suppress this group or get rid of it. The other thing is, it’s a message to the rest of society: ‘This is what the Communist Party can do. Don’t get on the wrong side of us.’”
“The reason you need the ‘vulnerable’ part is that most people aren’t psychopaths. The moment that you start believing that someone is less than human, that allows you to do terrible things. This is why genocides happen,” said Jekielek, whose father-in-law is a survivor of the Holocaust.
“Killed to Order” covers evidence of early experimentation on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, before the CCP had incarcerated likely millions of Falun Gong practitioners, and evidence that Uyghurs now detained en masse in labor camps may now be subjected to forced organ harvesting.
Jekielek’s concern is that other religious and ethnic minorities are next.
“I don’t know where that leads, but it looks to me like the regime is ramping up persecution of Christians, and I’m worried that these groups will be added in significant number as well for this whole killed to order doctrine,” Jekielek said.
