In short
Jan Jekielek discusses his book Killed to Order, alleging China runs an industrial system of forced organ harvesting from prisoners, tied to mass incarceration of Falun Gong and later Uyghurs, using military hospitals and logistics to “kill to order.”
Guest backgrounds
Jan Jekielek is the senior editor of Epic Times and author of Killed to Order. He says he entered the China human-rights space after early awareness of persecution and later credible whistleblower reports.
Key claims
By 1999, 70–100 million people practiced Falun Gong; the CCP persecuted and incarcerated perhaps 1–2 million. He claims organ matching uses blood/tissue/scan databases and that hospitals—often military—procure donors via military channels. He cites a China tribunal (2018–2020) and a 2022 American Journal of Transplantation paper (“Execution by Organ Procurement”) analyzing 2,000–3,000 papers and finding 70 instances violating the “dead donor rule.”
Notable examples
“Annie” (pseudonym) describing a surgeon husband confessing to removing 2,000 corneas from living people and a Falun Gong camp; Jacob Lavi (Israeli transplant association leader and Tel Aviv heart transplant professor) describing a patient offered a heart transplant in two weeks in China.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOIntroduction to China's Organ Harvesting
0:30 to 1:52
Discussing China's organ harvesting and the scale of the atrocity.
“Didn't necessarily mean kill everybody or something, but re-educate them, transform them, brainwash them.”
Jan Jekielek Joins the Discussion
1:52 to 3:06
Dave Rubin introduces Jan Jekielek and discusses his book.
“I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the senior editor of Epic Times and author of the new book Killed to Order, Jan Jekielek.”
Origins of the Organ Harvesting Issue
3:06 to 4:12
Exploring how China's organ harvesting operations were exposed.
“So I guess maybe why don't we start with how did this get on your radar?”
Evidence of Atrocities in China
4:12 to 6:50
Highlighting evidence of the organ harvesting practices in China.
“And, you know, we essentially over the years built our biggest adversary, which is in the subtitle of Killed to Order.”
Understanding the Scale of Organ Harvesting
6:50 to 8:06
Examining the scale and implications of China's organ procurement system.
“And what it is, is in 1999, the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting a group called Falun Gong.”
The Process Behind Forced Organ Harvesting
8:06 to 9:27
Detailing how the forced organ harvesting process works in China.
“I mean, this literally sounds like a sci-fi movie.”
Research Findings on Organ Procurement
9:27 to 10:39
Discussing research findings on the ethics of organ procurement in China.
“Because you have this sort of easy communication, cooperation that can happen.”
Changes in Perception Around Organ Harvesting
10:39 to 11:48
Analyzing societal changes in perception regarding China's organ harvesting.
“The researchers looked at the published peer-reviewed Chinese transplant literature.”
Legislation Against Forced Organ Harvesting
11:48 to 14:00
Discussing proposed legislation to combat forced organ harvesting.
“They built this whole massive system, bureaucracy, monstrous machinery to do it.”
China's Organ Harvesting Crisis
14:00 to 18:02
Explore the horrific reality of organ harvesting in China and its legislative implications.
“People would, as I start talking about it, people would clue out from the conversation, like literally.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hey, Chicagoland! The Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home By 1999, there were 70 to 100 million people by government estimate doing this, bigger than the Communist Party.
0:36The communists decided to crush it. Didn't necessarily mean kill everybody or something, but re-educate them, transform them, brainwash them. It's kind of standard operating procedure for the Communist Party over the years. But these people proved unusually resilient. So they pushed mass propaganda into the system, dehumanized them in the process of this persecution, straight out of 1930s Germany, actually talking points, this is what we're talking about. And they incarcerated perhaps a million, perhaps two, we don't know the exact numbers. The UN in 2005 said that half of the people in that whole massive incarceration system they have in China were fell and gone, right?
1:13So now what happened is some very evil person figured out, hey, wait a second, I can actually monetize this, right? Blood type, tissue type, organ scan, get the vitals of a whole lot of people in the system who, by the way, are known to be unusually healthy. And now if someone's got the money and they put it down, They're already pre-matched because in a database, someone that matches them because there's this large population already exists and they can be shipped and killed to order, which is why the name of my book is Killed to Order.
1:52I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the senior editor of Epic Times and author of the new book Killed to Order, Jan Jekielek. How are you, my friend? Dave, it's so good to be here. It's good to see you. I'm trying to think. You have interviewed me probably two dozen times. Have I ever interviewed you before? I'm not sure. I don't think so. Yeah, I've had you on American Thought Leaders a number of times, and I have to say I've enjoyed that as well. And we've run into each other a lot. But I think this is the first time. I haven't done this side of the interview as much. Lately, it's been a lot, but.
2:33Yeah. All right. Well, I will. I'll try not to beat you up too hard. But yes, we cross paths constantly at all of these different conferences and events. And I always enjoy chatting with you. And we'll get you on a regular panel show because you talk about a series of different things. However, the book is super interesting. And it's not a topic that I talk about too often. Obviously, people sort of talk about China these days. It's hard to figure out who really understands what's going on with China. But the focus of the book is about China's organ harvesting operations. So I guess maybe why don't we start with how did this get on your radar?
3:10Why do you care about this first? And then we'll dive into some of the specifics. Well, so I was in the China human rights space, okay? And how I fell into that is a whole other big story. But I knew very early on that this, you know, there was a narrative. Well, let's call it the Kissinger Doctrine. And the narrative was that if the U.S. pumps enough cash into China, right, and know-how and support and everything, then China is going to liberalize. It's going to become another Taiwan or South Korea or something like that. And I already knew back in the year 2000 that they were literally killing people for refusing to give up their faith.
3:52OK, and that's like, you know, there's a reason that that, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, all that is the First Amendment. OK, protections from government. A state that does that, you know, is not liberalizing, doesn't matter what they say performatively. Right. But but the narrative, I mean, this was Republican, Democrat, everyone kind of believed this. And, you know, we essentially over the years built our biggest adversary, which is in the subtitle of Killed to Order. So in 2006, I'd heard rumors that there's some kind of weird organ trafficking happening in China.
4:26But by 2006, independently, two different whistleblowers of sorts came forward with really shocking information that was credible. So one was, and this is what really, this is where I said, okay, you know what? My skepticism has now been overcome because I'm overly skeptical of most things, right? It's kind of a problem in a way. But there was a woman named Annie who had, that's a pseudonym. She had a husband who was a surgeon. And the husband confessed to her after basically almost destroying their relationship because he was having nightmares. He was just kind of unable to function almost. that he had removed 2 ,000 corneas from living people, okay?
5:12And that there was a sort of a camp that was filled with Falun Gong practitioners. I'll explain that connection in a moment that was being used. People were being shipped in here and basically used as these unwilling donors of different organs, including corneas. That was one, okay? Simultaneously in Israel, okay, there was a man named Jacob Lavi, who has become a hero of this kind of movement of exposing this issue. He was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association at one point. He was a professor of surgery at Tel Aviv University, heart surgeon, heart transplant surgeon. And he had a patient who told him one day, hey, listen, I've talked to him about this.
5:52It's absolutely shocking that he was tired of waiting and he was going to go to China and get his heart in two weeks scheduled. right and this is sort of there's a number of red flags here okay one of them is that that if you for a heart transplant to be scheduled you have to know when someone's going to be dead in an ethical situation there has to be a catastrophic accident and they have to match your blood type tissue type size you know but here are two weeks guaranteed right so you know when someone's going to be dead meaning you're making them dead. And number two, somehow you're able to find this perfect match to this person in the span of two weeks when most people have to wait months or years to get their transplant.
6:37And the combination of this, these two men from Canada, human rights lawyers, they wrote a report finding 17 lines of evidence that explained, yes, there's a terrible atrocity happening in China. And what it is, is in 1999, the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting a group called Falun Gong. It wasn't even really a group. It's a very grassroots movement, very self-directed. Truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, these people are practicing it. And it's spread by word of mouth, right? People sharing it one with each other, okay? And by 1999, there were 70 to 100 million people by government estimate doing this, bigger than the Communist Party.
7:18The Communists decided to crush it. It didn't necessarily mean kill everybody or something, but re-educate them, transform them, brainwash them. It's kind of standard operating procedure for the Communist Party over the years. But these people proved unusually resilient. So they pushed mass propaganda into the system, dehumanized them in the process of this persecution, straight out of 1930s Germany, actually talking points. This is what we're talking about. And they incarcerated perhaps a million, perhaps two. We don't know the exact numbers. The UN in 05 said that half of the people in that whole massive incarceration system they have in China were fell and gone.
7:55So now what happened is some very evil person figured out, hey, wait a second, I can actually monetize this. Blood type, tissue type, organs can get the vitals of a whole lot of people in the system who, by the way, are known to be unusually healthy. And now if someone's got the money and they put it down, they're already pre-matched because in a database, someone that matches them because there's this large population already exists and they can be shipped and killed to order, which is why the name of my book is Killed to Order. Right. So there's so much here. I mean, this literally sounds like a sci-fi movie.
8:31It's got components of a lot of different sci-fi movies, actually. So, okay, so they arrest, I mean, this is what dystopian sci-fi is all about, actually. So they arrest these people. Now they come in and they have this program. How were they killing people and how were they communicating with other people to say, oh, we've got the goods? So to the best of our knowledge, this is done through the military channels because most of the hospitals involved, okay, in doing this forced organ harvesting industry, or let's call it the kill-to-order industry, are military hospitals. And there's also a very good transportation network and communication network in the military.
9:15So the best understanding from the research is that's what's used. So if a hospital on one side of China gets the contract for 200K, it's not that hard to ship the person to be used as this unwilling donor from even across the country because the structure, remember, so this is where this sort of top-down, I call it obscenely hierarchical structure that the CCP operates comes in very handy, right? Because you have this sort of easy communication, cooperation that can happen. Okay. So they get the hospital, then gets the person, kills them, I assume some form of euthanizing them or something. They then harvest the organ.
9:59Let me comment on that, actually. So one of the pieces of evidence that came in after there was a China tribunal that was held late 2018 to early 2020, Sir Jeffrey Neese, who had prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, chaired a large people's tribunal of experts, and they looked through all of it. And they found even within two months of the starting to the study, they said, this is absolutely happening, but we're going to continue and look at the comprehensive set. They published a massive tome of evidence related to this. But even subsequent to that, there's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation from 2022, I believe, titled Execution by Organ Procurement.
10:39Execution by Organ Procurement. So what did they do? The researchers looked at the published peer-reviewed Chinese transplant literature. They looked through 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 papers, and they asked the question, is the dead donor rule being violated? Okay? And they found that in 70 instances, in the methods, the published public methods, okay, the dead donor rule is being violated. And what that means, to your point earlier, right, in answer to your question, that means that the method of that person's death is the organ removal itself. They're being killed by their organs being removed. And the way I read that is it's become so normalized.
11:22They built this massive bureaucracy. In 2000, there was very little organ procurement happening in China. They incarcerate the million or whatever it is, Falun Gong practitioners, and then it just grows geometrically. Thousands of transplant hospitals built, tens of thousands of transplants being done up to by around 2010, it's 60 to 90 ,000 transplants a year is the number we're looking at. But it just grows. It grows like this. They built this whole massive system, bureaucracy, monstrous machinery to do it. And now it's kind of churning through and basically doing this. And people are just gotten used to that.
12:02this is how organ transplantation works in China, right? And so they actually write it into their, they write this, you know, essentially murder into the scientific methods of their papers. Wow, it's just so incredible. So someone goes in, they want their heart. So in essence, they kill them for their heart. Now there's obviously many other organs that are going to be useful. I assume they're harvesting all of those extra organs and then that's just going down the chain as well. I would guess that. So the surgeons that we have who are whistleblowers who have actually been involved in this, none of them are from the stage where it's really scaled.
12:41There's people who basically killed a prisoner through harvesting their organs under military guard. There's one surgeon that did that, and he couldn't live with himself, basically, and has told the tale. So we don't know exactly, but the assumption is yes, especially since the advent of ECMO technology, right? ECMO is something that bypasses the heart and lungs. It's a machine. It's used to keep people alive that need some kind of brain surgery and so forth. Very useful for this. So potentially you can find multiple recipients from a single body. So the 60 ,000 to 90 ,000 transplants doesn't translate into 60 ,000 to 90 ,000 people, right?
13:23It could be quite a number less than that. but it's still an incredibly large number of transplants we're talking about. So now that some of this is being exposed, and I suspect your book will go a long way to exposing it further, I mean, do you expect anything to change? I mean, the Chinese have a pretty insular system. If they feel they're getting away with something, there's not a ton of pressure that the outside world can put on them, right? Well, there's a lot of things we can do. So the first thing that's really neat about this time, this is why I'm actually optimistic in the face of everything we just discussed, okay?
13:56For years, when I talked about this issue with people, I mean, I've been working on it for 20 years, right? People would, as I start talking about it, people would clue out from the conversation, like literally. And I would kind of understand why they're cluing out, because it's so horrible, right? You don't want to have to deal with the reality. But that's changed. And I think it's maybe the COVID years that have changed that. I think some of what we saw, like our own society going crazy around authoritarian ideas, right? That made no sense. But also in China, they were welding people into their homes, again, for no particularly good reason, just because they thought they could control a respiratory virus through extreme totalitarian means.
14:38It's kind of a weird mindset. I feel like people have changed their minds. Now when I talk to people about it, they go, wow, that's horrible. This is science fiction. What a monstrosity. I can't believe that's happening. And so there's actually two pieces of federal legislation right now that have passed the House near unanimously. One's called the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. Another one's called the Falun Gong Protection Act, even though it protects anyone who would be harvested. harvested, right? Actually, this is one of the tragedies. I'll just mention this, right? No one did anything about it for 14 or 15 years when they started using the Falun Gong as this sort of fodder for this kill-to-order industry.
15:16In 2014, 2015, they added the Uyghur people, right? Another very vulnerable group that they dehumanized and incarcerated en masse, perhaps a million, perhaps more people, and they started working on them. There's even a halal organs market that they're feeding. It's crazy, right? But this is what happens with crimes against humanity. By the way, they spread, right? I'm worried they're spreading further now. That's a whole different discussion. But in answer to your question, what can we do? Well, one of the policies of the Falun Gong Protection Act, one of the provisions is the U.S. policy should be to not cooperate with anything related to the transplant industry, okay, and communist China.
15:56And this is something actually that the administration could do very easily. Like we train surgeons in China, transplant surgeons. We have research partnerships. We have research funding from NIH. There was even a letter that the Select Committee on the CCP sent to Harvard about this general topic some months ago. It's actually, you know, so that we can, at the very least, we can remove our own complicity in it, which is actually considerable because we even supply some of the materials, technologies, solutions, all sorts of stuff, right? But at a bigger level, right, this stuff, these two pieces of legislation, they sanction people that are involved in this for life.
16:36And a lot of these Chinese super elites, you may be aware there's an economic, bit of economic turmoil happening in China. They all have exit strategies, and some of them are to America. And they're going to, the people that want to come to America, which is quite a few, they're going to think twice. They're going to say, hey, maybe I shouldn't be involved in this anymore because I don't want to be unable to do my exit strategy, right? So I don't think we can end it with a snap of the fingers, but I think we can put a dent in it and at least remove ourselves from it. Do we know if it's happening anywhere else in the world?
17:07I mean, I'm sure not at the scale that you've just described, but there must be incidences of these types of things happening. There's organ trafficking happening in many places, horribly, okay? There's black market organ rings that have been documented in multiple places, in Mexico, India, I mean, all over the place. But there's only one place that can do it at this industrial scale, because you really need a state actor to do it. You need to be able to incarcerate this massive group of people and dehumanize them, right? Because you kind of have to convince the population, right? Not everybody's a psychopath.
17:39So we have this weird trick of our psychology that when we start believing people are bad or less than us or somehow harming society through the propaganda, it makes it easier for us to do horrible things to them, right? So all these components are necessary to have this next level system that communist China is employing. It's an absolutely fascinating topic. The book is Killed to Order. And Jan, we will have you on for the topics of the day in the next little bit. It was good to see you, my friend. I would love that. KilledToOrder.com, if you want to get the book that's direct to the Amazon link.
18:16Thank you so much, Dave. This is awesome. Link right down below. We're professional operation over here. All right. Thanks, Jan. Thank you, sir. If you want a more worldly perspective on current events, check out our international playlist. And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. And to get notified of all future videos, be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell. Hey, Chicagoland, the WayBear store is in your neighborhood. at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators.
18:49Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home.
From the publisher
Dave Rubin of "The Rubin Report" talks to Jan Jekielek about his book Killed to Order and the investigation into China's alleged forced organ harvesting; reports of organ trafficking tied to Chinese military hospitals; the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs; evidence presented by journalists and human rights investigators; proposed U.S. legislation like the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act and the Falun Gong Protection Act; and the broader geopolitical and human rights implications of confronting the Chinese Communist Party, and much more. Order the book here: Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary: https://www.amazon.com/Killed-Order-Harvesting-Industry-Adversary/dp/1510786503

