How Communist China Threatens Unity in Canada: Epoch Times’ Jekielek Discusses the China Risk at Calgary Conference

The 2025 Reclaiming Conference was held Sept. 19-21.

China uses sophisticated techniques, including through social media, to create division in Western countries, says Jan Jekielek, senior editor with The Epoch Times. Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images

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 conference in Calgary 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, which was organized by the grassroots group We Unify and held from Sept. 19 to 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 creates division is with the use of social media platforms, especially those that it controls. He said Canadians should counteract these activities by embracing 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,” Jekielek said.

CCP’s Domestic ‘Enemy’

The strategy of stirring up division to crush unity has been used by all communist regimes as a way to consolidate their control domestically, said Jekielek, adding that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is no exception. He said the CCP always needs an “enemy” to justify its existence as the regime in control.

“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 practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It spread rapidly after being introduced to the public in China in 1992, and by 1999, an estimated 70 million to 100 million people were practising it in that country, according to Chinese government statistics. However, under a totalitarian regime such as the CCP, where all public and private life must be under the Party’s absolute control, this level of popularity wasn’t tolerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Centre. In July 1999, the regime launched a highly organized and well-funded campaign to persecute Falun Gong, resulting in the captivity, torture, killing, and even live organ harvesting of the practitioners, the centre says.

“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].” Jekielek is currently authoring the book “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.”

Understanding CCP’s Threat

Jekielek said that the West for years “vastly misunderstood” China, thinking that it was possible to change the totalitarian regime by engaging with Beijing in various ways, such as through commerce.

“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 said it should be understood today that China is the number-one threat to Western countries like Canada.

He expressed hope that those in the West can inform themselves about the true nature of totalitarian regimes in order to protect themselves from communist China’s attempts to subvert Western society.

“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 over 70 speakers who spoke on the themes of freedom, justice, health, sovereignty, and other topics.

Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek is currently authoring the book “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary,” due to be published on Feb. 17, 2026.