S U M M A R Y
Kill to Order: China's Forced Organ Harvesting
System
Source: China Insider interview with Jan Jekielek  |  Guest: Jan Jekielek, Senior Editor, Epoch Times; Host,
American Thought Leaders  |  Book: Kill to Order (killedtoorder.com)
Background and Origin of the Research
Jan Jekielek has spent nearly 20 years covering Chinese human rights issues. His initial work
involved an underground railroad helping Chinese religious dissidents and prisoners of conscience
— including Falun Gong practitioners — travel through the Golden Triangle (the border region of
Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand) to Bangkok, where they could obtain UN refugee status rather
than be deported back to China.
His entry into the forced organ harvesting issue was catalyzed by a phone call informing him that
10,000 Israelis had signed a petition to expose forced organ harvesting, to be presented at
Auschwitz. Two simultaneous threads of evidence were emerging at that time: a whistleblower
named Annie, whose surgeon husband had extracted corneas from 2,000 living people; and Israeli
transplant surgeon Dr. Yakov Levi, whose patient informed him of a scheduled heart transplant in
China — booked two weeks out, with a specific date. The patient traveled, received the heart, and
returned. The scheduling of a heart transplant is only possible if the donor's death is also
scheduled.
Dr. Levi, the child of Holocaust survivors, became an activist on the issue and helped enact some
of Israel's first anti-transplant-tourism laws in 2008.

What Makes This Different from Black-Market Trafficking
Forced organ harvesting in China is categorically distinct from ordinary organ trafficking.
Standard black-market organ crime is opportunistic — a victim is harmed and an organ is taken.
China's system is the reverse: a paying transplant customer is matched to a living prisoner in a
government database, payment is made, and then the prisoner is killed to fulfill the order. The
name of the book — Kill to Order — captures the sequence precisely.
This is only possible because a state actor — the Chinese Communist Party — can simultaneously
exercise two forms of coercive power: mass incarceration of a target population and the forced
construction of industrial transplant infrastructure. Neither alone creates the crime. Together, they
enable transplant wait times of two weeks for matched organs, compared to months or years in
ethical transplant systems worldwide.
Why Falun Gong Was Targeted
Multiple factors converged in 1999 when Jiang Zemin launched the persecution of Falun Gong:
Numerical threat: By government estimate, 70–100 million people practiced Falun Gong —
more than the 60 million Communist Party members. Any mass-scale, organized movement
outside party control is structurally intolerable to the CCP.
Personal animus: Evidence suggests Jiang Zemin harbored personal jealousy toward Falun Gong
founder Li Hongzhi's genuine popular affection — a form of legitimacy a dictator cannot
manufacture.
Structural incompatibility with totalitarianism: Falun Gong's design — no hierarchy, no
membership rolls, no money collection, no worship of the founder, individualized practice defined
by living principles rather than affiliation — removes nearly every tool the CCP normally uses to

dismantle organizations. Practitioners proved far more resistant to re-education than anticipated,
leading to a larger and larger incarcerated population.
The CCP's standard tool for enabling atrocity — dehumanizing propaganda that reclassifies a
target population as dangerous enemies — was deployed extensively to reframe practitioners of
truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance as threats to the state.
How the System Grew: Regionally Administered Totalitarianism
The mechanism explaining forced organ harvesting's explosive geometric growth from 2000 to
2005 — from a limited practice to hundreds of certified hospitals — is identified by Stanford
scholar Chongyuan Shu as "regionally administered totalitarianism" (RAT). Unlike Soviet
communism, which transmitted specific directives down the hierarchy, Chinese communism
transmits objectives and priorities, then rewards or punishes officials based on outcomes. Local
officials choose their own methods and compete to demonstrate effectiveness.
Two simultaneous top-level directives intersected: (1) "eradicate" Falun Gong — meaning re-
educate, break, and incarcerate — and (2) grow the transplant industry, a known state economic
priority. At some point, one province recognized that a large incarcerated Falun Gong population
and a transplant capacity mandate were not competing demands — they were synergistic. The
financial returns were substantial, the political rewards followed, and other provinces replicated
the model. The system spread not by central command but by competitive local emulation.
Parallel precedent: when Xi Jinping declared military-civil fusion a top national priority, he
needed to say nothing more — every institution with military-applicable technology began
voluntarily integrating military oversight.

Scale of the System
Researcher Ethan Gutman testified before Congress with a methodology based on 146 ministry-
approved transplant facilities and minimum state-mandated activity levels. Even conservatively,
the calculation yields 50,000–80,000 transplants per year; accounting for flagship facilities
(including military hospitals capable of 5,000+ transplants annually), the figure exceeds 100,000.
Jekielek and co-researcher Matthew Robertson place their estimate at 60,000–90,000 per year to
remain conservative.
At the pricing levels in evidence, this represents approximately a $9 billion annual industry. The
current estimated number of participating hospitals has grown from 146 to approximately 200. All
indicators suggest the system is at the same level or has expanded since Gutman's 2016 testimony
— it has not been dismantled.
The Uyghur population in Xinjiang was added to the victim pool around 2014–2015, subjected to
the same blood-typing and tissue-typing as Falun Gong practitioners had been.
The Evidence
No single video of an organ extraction exists — the crime scene is a scrubbed operating room and
the victims have already been made invisible. But the body of evidence is substantial:
The China Tribunal (chinatribunal.com): Two years of dedicated legal-style examination of the
full evidentiary record through 2020.
"Execution by organ procurement" (American Journal of Transplantation): 70 instances
identified in peer-reviewed Chinese medical literature where the extraction of organs itself caused
the death of the patient — violations of the dead donor rule published without apparent awareness
that they constituted admissions of murder.

Survivor Chongping: A living survivor of organ harvesting whose physical condition — missing
part of his liver and part of his lung — is acknowledged even by the CCP's own account, which
offers only an alternative explanation for the cause.
Undercover video: Investigators posed as transplant tourists and received confirmation from
Chinese hospitals that organs could be sourced on short timelines.
The CCP's silence: No credible alternative explanation for China's two-week transplant wait
times has ever been offered. The CCP's only response has been to attack researchers.
Why the System Persists
Once a large bureaucratic and financial machine is built around a crime, several forces make it
self-perpetuating: the money flows are too large, too many careers depend on continuation, the
guilt is shared widely enough that no individual wants to trigger accountability, and the standard
of proof needed to stop it is very high precisely because the evidence is systematically destroyed.
The CCP's 2015 claim to have established a legitimate organ registry was exposed as fraud — the
reported figures formed a mathematically perfect quadratic curve, statistically impossible from
real data.
Call to Awareness and Action
Kill to Order (killedtoorder.com) is positioned as both a reference work and a tool for generating
public awareness. Jekielek argues that awareness is a meaningful lever in this case — transplant
tourism requires willing participants, and legislative action (like Israel's 2008 law) can close that
pathway. A Rotary club network has committed to raising awareness nationwide. A launch event
with Rob Schneider at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was scheduled for March 16, 2025
(killedtoorderevent.com).