Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were chatting while strolling toward a military parade at Tiananmen Square in September of 2025 when a microphone picked up their comments about living 150 years or longer. In Communist China, that possibility isn’t just wishful thinking, as Jan Jekielek’s book, Killed to Order, reveals. The regime clearly has a supply of fresh body parts in prison storage available when needed for elite party members as well as for transplant tourists willing to pay handsomely for an anonymous victim’s liver, kidney, or heart. The public obituary of an 87-year-old communist official in which he boasts that “many of his components are not his anymore” hints at that fact.
A more chilling statement comes from the ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon in northwest China. She asserts that three to four thousand political prisoners were killed for their organs at the hospital where she and her husband worked. The husband estimated that he removed corneas from around two thousand live prisoners. In another specific case reliably related to Jekielek, a “Chinese military surgeon killed eight prisoners of conscience to supply one foreign patient with a matching kidney.”
The fate of those subjected to forced organ removals is almost always death and immediate cremation, but one person, Cheng Pei Ming, survived an initial surgery and later told his story. Cheng was arrested as a Falun Gong member for protesting the group’s persecution. Tortured in prison, he survived an initial forced surgery. Prior to what would doubtless have been a second surgery and death, he escaped and eventually made his way to the U.S. via Thailand. In the States, he discovered that part of his liver and lung had been removed in a procedure that wasn’t health-based.
In chapter five of Killed to Order, Jekielek provides a chronological arrangement of forced organ-harvesting events that goes back to 1984. It includes numerous studies by human rights and medical groups that share an inevitable conclusion: The sheer number of Chinese transplants plus short waiting times and the number of transplant hospital beds disprove the regime’s 2015 claim to have ended executions of prisoners specifically for forced organ removals. Further incriminating evidence is the regime’s attention to medical details like blood type among vast numbers of prisoners, many of whom are tortured.
Jekielek notes that Muslim Uyghurs in Northwest China were the first large group used by the government for forced transplants. By 1999, however, a spiritual group practicing Falun Gong had grown to as many as 100 million adherents, a number that rivaled the regime’s party membership. Falun Gong combines Tai Chi–like exercises with meditation and an emphasis on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. This burgeoning practice, rooted in traditional Chinese spirituality, was seen as a threat to the Communist Party and began to be suppressed as a dangerous “cult.” With thousands imprisoned, Falun Gong became a desirable source of forced organ transplants thanks to their healthy life practices.
It may come as a surprise to readers that much of this relatively short book is devoted to the Chinese communist belief system, whose sole governing principle is the welfare of the Communist Party. This focus explains how it’s possible for the regime to dispense with normal ethical standards and to treat the organs of dissidents, or even newborns, as inventory replacement parts for Party members and paying customers. As part of this analysis of communist thought and practice, Jekielek mentions an intriguing concept introduced by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Lobaczewski: political pathocracy.
"In this system, he determined, power doesn’t rise through merit or moral character; it concentrates in the hands of those with sociopathic and psychopathic traits — people devoid of empathy, integrity, or restraint — because those are the qualities most rewarded by the system itself." (This observation, I think, also applies to political parties in the U.S., especially those obsessively focused on the accumulation of government power.)
Jekielek also explains why China’s medical barbarism isn’t widely publicized in the U.S. Those explanations start with a trip to China in 2001 by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and other paper bigwigs. At those meetings, the regime successfully propagandized the delegation with the idea that Falun Gong is a dangerous cult. Subsequently, the Times largely echoed the Party line vis-à-vis Falun Gong. In return, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin complemented the Times as “a very good paper.” It was another Walter Duranty moment in the Times’ inglorious history of spreading communist lies.
Beyond the newspaper of record’s complicity, Jekielek mentions the illusion that Kissinger’s “opening” to China via trade would lead to China’s liberalization. In fact, it led to decades of stolen property rights, the undermining of American manufacturing, and a huge market for corporatist billionaires willing to ignore communist atrocities. Quoting Mark Twain, the author notes, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” That comment also applies to American universities long influenced by full-paying Chinese students and massive Chinese grants. Finally, there is the psychological explanation that most people don’t want to believe such horrors are true — a response also encountered by a Polish resistance courier who brought eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West.
Jekielek himself, the son of a family that fled communist Poland in the ’70s, is a senior editor at the Epoch Times, a newspaper founded by Falun Gong dissidents in America who earlier experienced the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The paper continues to focus attention on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has thus been a target of CCP-initiated vandalism and repression even in America. A similar program of intimidation within the U.S. has been directed at the Falun Gong artistic group Shen Yun, which advertises its performances as “China Before Communism.”
Though I have some qualms about the book’s organization, the well documented information it provides about medical atrocities perpetrated by a morally corrupt regime certainly nullifies those reservations. The more Americans know about China’s atrocities, the less likely they’ll give the regime a moral pass it clearly does not deserve.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.
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