A groundswell of confidence in ending one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) biggest crimes against humanity emerged on March 16 at the Trump–Kennedy Center, as humanitarians and specialists celebrated the launch of “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.”
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 to talk about the book and what this new exposure means for the CCP.
in 2019, the independent China Tribunal concluded there was clear evidence that forced organ harvesting in China has been perpetrated “on a significant scale” and that practitioners of Falun Gong were the principal source of organs. Whistleblower testimony and independent reports of the crime began emerging as early as 2006. Conservative estimates based on Chinese hospital capacity and transplant infrastructure put the number of forced organ harvesting transplants anywhere between 60,000 and 90,000 each year.
“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.
“God calls upon us to do something about it,” Schneider said. “This is a great injustice that’s happening to our fellow human beings, and it will keep happening unless people step up and participate and say no to this brutality, and each person in this room is the next leader in this movement.”
Jan Jekielek, Epoch Times Sentior editor and host of American Thought Leaders, speaks during this book launch "Killed to Order" at the Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington on March 16, 2026. jan Jekielek, Epoch Times senior editor and host of American Thought Leaders, speaks during his book launch “Killed to Oder” at the Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington on March 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times
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.
Ethical organ transplantation requires a voluntary donor who matches a variety of medical criteria, including biological compatibility and, except in cases such as a single kidney transplant, is very recently deceased. Wait times are measured in years, and the waitlist in the United States is more than 108,000 people.
Yet in the early 2000s in China, advertisements boasted of two-week wait times, and doctors were hearing about people who might pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and return for organ transplant aftercare weeks later. Undercover investigators began to call these Chinese hospitals to inquire about the transplants and were given prices and invitations to come in one or two weeks. Then they asked directly if they could source the organs from a Falun Gong practitioner, to which they replied, “Yes.”
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 the principles of 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 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.ere 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.
Robert Destro, former assistant U.S. secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, said he was given a lot of grief when he pushed for the rescue of a man who would turn out to be the first known survivor of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting. He said the unspoken message directed toward him was, “Don’t upset the Chinese.”
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 goe
"I was stunned,” Destro told The Epoch Times.
Robert Destro, former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, speaks during a press conference in Washington on August 9, 2024.
There are signs that the Chinese public is aware that the CCP elites perpetuate organ harvesting and that they may not be safe either. Waves of parents have pulled their children out of school in China over fears that students are being targeted. Numerous accusations against Chinese hospitals and surgeons harvesting organs from unwitting patients have also emerged on Chinese social media.
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
I remember thinking, what a strange story to tell someone about your own country,” Jones told The Epoch Times.
‘THE CCP's DAYS ARE NUMBERED’
Audience members, including Jones, said 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.”
Jones leads a Catholic human rights nonprofit, the Vulnerable People Project, and is mailing every Catholic bishop in the United States and every Catholic patriarch and cardinal globally a copy of the book with a letter urging them to ask Pope Leo not to renew the Vatican’s agreement to allow the CCP oversight over the church in China
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, 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.
“I’m really optimistic that we'll be able to move the House and the Senate,” Jay Richards, senior fellow and vice president of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times. “I think that there’s a large enough awareness now.”
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 are so many different levels on which it is reprehensible, appalling, and odious, but at the end of the day, it’s just one example—although 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 worldvie
"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.”
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, 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 U.S. 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.
Author and investigative reporter Richard Miniter told The Epoch Times, “If Jimmy Lai emerges from Chinese prison without a cornea, Jan’s book will tell us why they took it.”
“Killed to Order” was released on March 17. Order on Amazon
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