While Canadians seeking a heart transplant may wait months or years to find a match, in China, one can be obtained within weeks, New York Times best-selling author and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek said at a book talk event in Toronto. But there is a very dark reality behind this.
Jekielek, a China researcher, released a new book titled “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary” in March, and held a book talk and Q&A event at Toronto City Hall on May 27.
“If I’m this wealthy transplant tourist and I have very loose morals and $100,000 or $200,000 to spend, I can show up, pay that cash, and at that moment there’s a database of people,” Jekielek said during the event.
He noted there are incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners, and more recently Uyghur Muslims, who make up a pool of “so-called donors” who have already been blood-typed and tissue-typed in advance, allowing a matched donor to be “shipped and killed to order.”
The title of his book, “Killed to Order,” reflects this inversion of an ethical organ donor system, where one can pay to receive an organ from a vast pool of potential victims, he said.
“Killed to Order” compiles 20 years of evidence from independent investigations that expose the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) industrial-scale practice of forced organ harvesting, how it became an estimated $9 billion industry, and how the West was drawn into complicity.
The other, he said, was an Israeli transplant surgeon whose patient told him he had scheduled a heart transplant in China in two weeks.
“Scheduling a heart transplant ... obviously someone is being killed,” Jekielek said. “And the two-week wait time—how do you get that? You need to have this kill-to-order database.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a traditional Chinese spiritual discipline centred on self-improvement that consists of five meditative exercises as well as moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice quickly grew in popularity in the 1990s and government statistics indicated between 70 million and 100 million people had taken up the practice.
Jekielek said China’s forced organ harvesting system was “built on the backs of the Falun Gong practitioners,” but around 2015 or 2016, when there wasn’t much of a global response to the issue, the CCP added Uyghur Muslims to its list of “donors.”
Ottawa–Beijing Relations
Informing people in the West about the true nature of the CCP, at a time when countries like Canada are seeking to get closer to the communist regime, is something that motivated Jekielek to write “Killed to Order.”He noted Ottawa has signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, which he said is “very serious” because the CCP “totally disregards the basic dignity of human life.”
“It’s really shocking that the state security of a totalitarian regime would have a memorandum of understanding with a police force or security agency in a democratic country,” Jekielek said, adding that such a deal “doesn’t really make any sense” and threatens local communities.
Jekielek said it is clear to him that people in Canada, including politicians, do not understand the true nature of the CCP. He warned that the CCP views countries like Canada not as partners, but as adversaries, and has a “zero-sum” way of thinking with the long-term aim of making Western democracies vassal states.
Meanwhile, Jekielek reflected on how public receptivity has changed since he began speaking about the issue of China’s forced organ harvesting industry in 2006. He said at first, people wouldn’t believe it and would mentally check out mid-conversation.
But now, Jekielek said, people’s response has shifted. He partially credited the shift in people’s thinking to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting there was a “totalitarian impulse on our own society,” which he said educated Western people more about the nature of the CCP.
What Can Be Done?
Audience members asked Jekielek what governments and individuals in the West can do about China’s forced organ harvesting system. Jekielek pointed to two pieces of legislation that passed unanimously in the U.S. House of Representatives, including sanctions and formal reporting mechanisms that would legally establish the practice of forced organ harvesting as real.“There’s still people in the medical industry that say this isn’t real, this is an urban myth, this is propaganda,” he said. “So a key part is saying, yes, this is real.”
He noted that while efforts such calling MPs or sending them “Killed to Order” might seem like small tasks, they make a big difference when they are done collectively.
“Every family in China, just about as you will know, has a family history of someone being persecuted, of some terrible thing having happened. After all, the Chinese regime is the biggest killer of human beings in the history of the world,” Jekielek said.
He said hundreds of millions of people have quit the CCP over the years through Falun Gong practitioners’ efforts that over time have made a “huge difference.”
Paul Brohman, a Hamilton resident, attended the book talk and documentary screening event in Toronto and told NTD, a sister outlet of The Epoch Times, that his biggest takeaway from the event was realizing the reality of the CCP’s totalitarian nature and what it means for the Chinese people or anyone who holds faith or different value systems in China.
“The enlightenment is that there’s something that we can do. We can reach out to our MPs, we can read the book, we can talk to people who may think that perhaps in Canada that economic gain is more important than values,” Brohman said. “Do we want to do major business with a regime that does not honour human life?”
Brohman said hundreds of millions of people stepping away from the CCP sends a “wonderful message” to China and the Chinese people that “there is hope and there is potentially freedom for them away from the totalitarian regime.”
