The Chinese Communist Party is harvesting the organs of 60,000 to 90,000 living victims every year as part of its bureaucracy, said Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times, during a speech sponsored by the president’s office and hosted in the Heritage Room on March 12.
“You have to be able to propagandize the population and dehumanize a large group of people as a starting point,” he said. “Whenever an atrocity happens, there’s always a dehumanization component. Normal human beings cannot do bad things easily to their neighbor. It just doesn’t work. But we can get tricked psychologically.”
The Epoch Times is an international media company that opposes the CCP and is associated with the religious movement known as Falun Gong, a traditionalist Chinese religion that is heavily persecuted in China.
Jekielek said he eventually discovered a connection between organ harvesting and a CCP longevity plan known as the 981 Project. Previously, it was known that CCP leaders live an average of 10 years longer than the average person.
Jekielek said he heard a shocking conversation between Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that occurred last September, after friends notified him of the encounter and he received a credible translation of what the leaders were saying.
“Xi says to Putin, ‘When we’re 70, we’re just babies.’ Putin responds and says ‘Through continual organ transplantation, perhaps we can achieve immortality.’ And Xi answers, ‘Our target is 150 years,’” he said.
Later, Jekielek said he was sent a Chinese obituary that celebrated that a deceased CCP minister had many transplanted organs.
Jekielek said he hopes his recently released book, titled “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry & the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary,” can be used as a tool to end U.S. complicity in China’s organ harvesting.
“We train some of these surgeons in America,” he said. “We’ve funded research partnerships.”
Jekielek said the U.S. provides China with tools used for organ transplants by selling it ECMO machines, a type of life support device that temporarily supports the body when the heart and lungs are no longer functioning. ECMO machines are needed to keep organs useful for transplantation and are used in China’s organ trade.
“You can’t transplant from a completely dead body,” he said.
China has “black classes,” a term given to low-ranking groups targeted by the CCP regime, according to Jekielek. Practitioners of Falun Gong and Uyghur Muslims are two black classes commonly used for forced organ harvesting, and the victims are mass incarcerated, making their murder easier, he said.
“Falun Gong grew to be so big that 70 to 100 million, by government estimate, were practicing, and the regime decided to crush it,” he said. “And communist regimes have a long history of crushing different groups. It’s part of how they operate and how they maintain control of societies. They instrumentalize the use of people’s bodies that are deemed to be lesser than.”
Jekielek said he spent years investigating the CCP’s practice of forced organ harvesting, where he said living victims are killed for an industry worth about $9 billion annually.
Jakielek provided a hypothetical example of what a Chinese elite in need of an organ transplant would think about the procedure.
“I don’t have a lot of moral boundaries to my thinking. The moment I pay that money, that person is shipped, and they kill them so I can live,” he said. “A Chinese elite has, on demand, organs available at a moment’s notice forever. What is that worth to someone who has no moral boundary?”
Jekielek argued that America has gravely misunderstood the nature of the Chinese government. He cited the foreign policy approach put forth by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, known as the “Kissinger Doctrine.” He said this doctrine mistakenly believed that by economically enriching China, the country would become a liberal democracy. According to Jekielek, the grave human rights violations committed in China are proof that the country isn’t liberalizing.
Jekielek said he supports Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Jeff Merkley’s, D-Oregon, Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Act, a bipartisan bill introduced on March 11 which states that U.S. policy should be uncooperative with forced organ transplantation and sanction anyone involved. Jekielek said the practice should also be deemed an atrocity under the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, which would make the U.S. government officially state that organ harvesting is both real and an atrocity.
Sophomore Finnian MacAulay said the talk highlighted America’s attachment to Chinese crimes.
“One point he mentioned was that administrations are very tentative about economically detaching from China, because that will have negative economic implications for our country, which would be very unpopular in the short term and prevent them from getting elected again,” MacAulay said. “It’s an issue that administrations are incentivized to stay away from.”
Senior Tommy Smith said he thought it was important to learn how China has influenced the U.S. after Kissinger’s policy ideas and noted the prevalence of utilitarianism.
“He’s a great example of a professional who understands the consequences of the work he does and how he can impact lives,” Smith said. “It’s a refreshing thing to see, especially in the biomedical field, because it is a very hard field to take a stand in.”
