The book compiles the strongest evidence from 20 years of independent investigations, exposing the CCP’s industrial-scale forced organ harvesting, and the sometimes unwitting complicity of the West.
Author Jan Jekielek, senior editor and Washington bureau chief of The Epoch Times and host of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” sat down with comedian, actor, and author Rob Schneider about the book and what this new exposure means for the CCP.
“When I started 20 years ago, it was really hard to talk to people about this,” Jekielek said. “People would kind of escape.
“I think that COVID, that time, watching people in China being welded into their homes—and frankly, some of our own totalitarian impulse being exposed—that has changed our collective consciousness; we’re a bit wiser, and when I talk to people these days, most people are ready to believe it.”
No longer a topic met with confusion or ignorance, the nature of the CCP was largely revealed to the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, audience members said, leading to a new understanding and sense of urgency. Experts who’ve spent more than a decade raising awareness about the issue and newcomers alike said this is no longer a topic that is “hard to believe,” but an atrocity that exemplifies the nature of the CCP.
A Growing Crime
The CCP’s forced organ harvesting was spotlighted last year when CCP leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic talking about using organ transplants to prolong life.Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that gained widespread popularity in China in the 1990s. It includes slow-moving exercises and teachings based on three core tenets: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. By the end of the decade, state estimates put the total number of Chinese practicing Falun Gong between 70 million and 100 million, or one in 13 Chinese.
Then, practically overnight, Falun Gong was banned. Nationwide arrests were carried out in the small hours of July 20, 1999, and a violent persecution soon followed. Then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin had personally ordered the persecution and even boasted that the spiritual practice would be history in short order. Yet adherents of the practice by and large refused to renounce Falun Gong, Jekielek said, and instead created one of the world’s largest civil disobedience movements that continues to this day. He said that Falun Gong practitioners in China continue to raise awareness about what the practice is, dispelling CCP propaganda, and in many cases inspiring their fellow citizens to quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations.
However, the tremendous number of Falun Gong practitioners being incarcerated by the regime meant the CCP now had in hand a captive, vulnerable population to conduct medical experiments on.
“The real tragedy is they built this thing over 15 years on the backs of the Falun Gong. Then in 2014, 2015, no one really did much about it; there were some resolutions but nothing with teeth, no real international outcry—this is the problem with atrocity-type situations, they spread. So they added the Uyghurs,” Jekielek said.
There is growing evidence that Uyghur Muslims have become another vulnerable population targeted by the CCP for organ harvesting. For example, photographs have been taken inside airports near Uyghur population centers, where priority boarding zones are blocked off for organ deliveries.
“And I’ve noticed there’s been an uptick in this dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians,” Jekielek said, noting that the CCP’s dehumanization propaganda about Falun Gong and Uyghurs also preceded its mass internment and violent persecutions of these groups.
But even as someone working on human rights who was aware of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting, he said he hadn’t realized the sheer scale of the CCP’s operations—an industry worth an estimated $9 billion—and how far back it goes. “I was stunned,” he told The Epoch Times.
Filmmaker and activist Jason Jones said his first brush with the topic came about 15 years ago when conversing with a Chinese stuntman, who recalled seeing a traffic accident outside his hotel window in China. He said the medical team rushed in to remove the victim’s organs before a second ambulance came for the body.
‘The CCP’s Days Are Numbered’
Audience members including Jones said that the end is in sight for the CCP’s forced organ harvesting, and by extension, the CCP itself.“When I came to understand [forced organ harvesting], it made perfect sense: The CCP has been waging a war in China,” Jones said. “First, it waged a war on its ancestors. That’s what the Cultural Revolution was. Then, the one-child policy was waging a war on its descendants, its children, and its posterity.”
“What is organ harvesting? It’s the beginning of the end of the CCP, because it’s cannibalism. It’s literally eating itself.”
“This book could be key to the beginning [of the collapse of the CCP],” he said. “I think it’s going to be very soon, because evil is a deprivation, and regimes that become so evil lack substance and they collapse in on themselves. I think the CCP’s days are numbered.”
Indira Rice Donegan, president-elect of the Gainesville Haymarket Rotary club, has spent her time with Rotary focused on combating human trafficking, an issue that overlaps with organ harvesting.
“A lot of this [movement] is good human beings understanding there is a significant problem,” she told The Epoch Times. “Once they find out, they have to do something, even if it’s just talking to their own neighbors and family members.”
“It’s an unbelievable humanitarian crisis that’s taking place, and I know, at least for me as a veteran and as an American and as a Rotarian, I don’t want my folks, the west, to be complicit in that, in any way, shape, or form,” she said. “Rotarians are famous for eradicating things—like polio. So I don’t think ending forced organ harvesting is outside the realm of possibility, because once people know the truth, evil has very little to hold onto.”
As shared understanding grows, so will solutions to end forced organ harvesting, Donegan said, pointing to the federal bills introduced to combat organ harvesting that increasingly include real penalties for complicity.
A bipartisan bill was recently introduced in the Senate to sanction foreign individuals involved in forced organ harvesting, and a similar bill had already passed in the House twice, but had fallen by the wayside with no movement in the Senate.
Understanding Evil
As someone who took an oath to protect and save life, Ryan Cole said learning about forced organ harvesting was a shocking look at medicine driven to a utilitarian bioethics extreme, but “Killed to Order” pulls together evidence that is too consistent to discount and too human to ignore.“From Germany, to Israel, to China, to here, it’s not just one group or one person talking about it, it’s a lot of different, disparate, non-connected groups telling the same story,” he told The Epoch Times. “When you put the human story to what’s happening, I think it wakes up the heart and the mind of people that may otherwise not be willing to listen or understand.”
Cole, a doctor and Independent Medical Alliance senior fellow, said that until a few years ago, “evil” was never a word used in medical conferences, but now it’s a word being used in the scientific setting, as health reclaims a focus on spirituality and humanity.
“This is a symptom of an evil regime,” Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, told The Epoch Times. “There’s so many different levels on which it is reprehensible, appalling, odious, but at the end of the day, it’s just one example—though particularly graphic—of how that evil is compounded by profit.”
Radio host and author Eric Metaxas said the CCP’s forced organ harvesting is an extension of its atheistic and materialistic worldview.
“Ultimately, this is a question of, what do you believe? Do you believe human beings are sacred and made in the image of God or not? And if not, then we’re just a bunch of cells,” he told The Epoch Times. “The whole world needs to know. This is the face of communism. This is the face of Marxism.”
“This is the most clarifying issue that exists between two world views ... between communist atheism, which is also atheist materialism, versus a biblical view, which says human beings are sacred and we do not have the right to treat people like commodities,” he said.
Grant Newsham, senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, said illusions about the CCP are very nearly gone.
“I think, generally speaking, on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. public, I think there really is a dislike, there’s a sense that [the Chinese regime] is our enemy. Finally, that people are recognizing it more than ever,” he told The Epoch Times. “I think that the whole organ harvesting issue is just one that I don’t think really surprises anyone anymore. It is easy to believe. It is really what the Chinese Communist Party is all about. It really reflects the nature of that regime.”
Several attendees called on President Donald Trump to bring up the issue of forced organ harvesting in his planned meeting with Xi.
“This has to be on the top of his list to address this issue of saying we cannot move forward with economic related, strong economic relationships unless we start seeing ... the stopping of this organ harvesting,” Mercedes Schlapp, CPAC senior fellow, told The Epoch Times.
“If Jimmy Lai emerges from Chinese prison without a cornea, Jan’s book will tell us why they took it,” author and investigative reporter Richard Miniter told The Epoch Times.
