Killed To Order: Organ Harvesting in China

Jan Jekielek
Jan Jekielek is an award-winning journalist, NYT bestselling author, and filmmaker with over 20 years at The Epoch Times, where he serves as senior editor and host of the show “American Thought Leaders.” His career has spanned academia, human rights work, and most recently journalism.

INTRODUCTION: THE ‘CHINA OPTION’

A DESPERATE SITUATION, A MIRACULOUS SOLUTION

“May” is 45 years old. She could be someone you know. She could live in Des Moines, Iowa, or the suburbs of Vancouver, or Manhattan, New York. She could be an attorney, or a stay-at-home mother, or perhaps she’s a sixth-grade science teacher, a job she loves so much she doesn’t even think of it as work. She has a loving husband and two young daughters, eight and 10.

Her symptoms begin subtly – fatigue, swelling in her ankles and feet, a loss of appetite – then steadily grow more alarming: shortness of breath, nausea, muscle cramps, darkening skin, numbness. After months of doctors’ visits and a battery of tests, she is finally diagnosed with chronic kidney failure.

Within a couple of years, May’s condition progresses to the point that she requires dialysis three times a week, tethered to machines that perform the work her kidneys no longer can. She is suffering terribly – not only from the pain, exhaustion, and relentlessness of dialysis, but from the sense that she has placed an unbearable strain on her family. At times, it feels as though she has abandoned them. She knows they are doing everything they can to hold things together, but their best no longer feels like enough. Their lives are slowly coming apart.

A kidney transplant is possible, but only in the distant future. No one even talks about it. The waiting list is measured in years – often two to five, sometimes longer – so long that it feels almost abstract, and impossible to plan around. For now, there is only more of the same: a slow, painful decline in the quality of May’s life, and in the lives of those who love her, and the doctor tells her that less than half of people on dialysis survive to five years. It is enough to make her cry, which she does, quietly, often, and alone. One day, while waiting for yet another medical appointment, she overhears a conversation between two women. In low voices, they are discussing something they keep calling “the China option.” May apologizes for eavesdropping, but asks what they are talking about. “What’s the China option?” She would not normally be paying attention, but she’s desperate.

The two women exchange a look. They explain: quick transplants, no wait times, organs matched very fast. You might make it. You might get to spend many more years with your family. You might not leave them broken and bereaved. For kidneys, at this point, it’s 30 grand.

“Here,” one of the women says, pulling out a piece of paper. “It’s an ad, but there’s some good information. And a broker’s name.”

When she tells her family about the conversation, they are elated. It seems too good to be true. Is it really possible? Why hadn’t anyone mentioned this before? Should they do it? It’s a lot of money, but it’s for the family, for the future. Who can put a price on health?

“It seems risky,” May tells her husband.

“What do we have to lose?” he asks. “If it works, just think . . . ”

She doesn’t have to think. All she’s been able to do is think: What happens if it works? It would be . . . a miracle.

“Let’s do it,” she says.

May calls the number on the ad, speaks to a broker, and they agree to the terms. Though it all seems legitimate and too good to be true, May does not ask too many questions. She is surviving at this point more on hope than anything else. When the money is paid, no receipt is given, only a note that, for all intents and purposes, says nothing.

The broker arranges everything. Blood samples are sent ahead. Within days, a match is made, and travel arrangements are set. May will fly to China, and the surgery will take place at the Shanghai Number One People’s Hospital. It’s a stark building, far from the bustling street. There is a transplant ward with 13 rooms, three beds each. Patients come from Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Hawaii – all over the world.

When she arrives, everything goes according to plan. May is picked up from the airport and travels, in relative comfort, to the facility, where she meets with doctors and nurses. Nothing about it seems remotely suspect, and any concerns she’d been harboring begin to fade.

The operation will be tomorrow at dawn. May is isolated in a sterile pre-op area. She does have one question, though, which she asks one of the doctors: Who is the kidney coming from? She feels grateful to the donor.

All she is told is that the kidney will be sourced fresh. She doesn’t ask any more questions.

Before the operation, cross-matching is done, and the kidney, when it is delivered, is found to be incompatible. The organ can’t be used. It happens, they explain, but not to worry, there are more donors. The next day, another kidney is brought, and this one is a match. The operation lasts about four hours. Four other patients receive their kidneys the same day. May sees them around as she recovers.

For the next five days, she remains in the hospital under observation. Then another seven in an ordinary room. After about two weeks, May returns home with two souvenirs: her new kidney, which is functioning perfectly, and a small booklet containing information about aftercare. That’s it.

For a while, she’s constantly reminded of her new kidney, and of the whole strange experience. There’s the recovery, first, and the pain. But then there’s just a scar, which itself fades. In time, she puts the whole experience behind her. She moves on with her life, profoundly grateful to have it.

But one day she reads a news report that catches her eye. It tells of a woman, a whistleblower, claiming that her surgeon husband has performed thousands of surgeries on Chinese prisoners without their consent. She suddenly feels a sharp pain, a pang of awareness. She remembers something someone told her – maybe the broker, maybe a doctor – that the organs came from death-row prisoners. But that’s not what the whistleblower says. She says the organs came from political and religious prisoners, people who practice something called Falun Gong, a spiritual practice persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party with hundreds of thousands of practitioners locked up.

May’s hands are shaking as she reads on, a terrible thought dawning on her: that someone died – no, that a person was murdered – so that she could live. A wave of nausea hits her. She feels disgusting, violated, guilty, complicit, criminal. She thinks of calling the broker, of demanding answers, but she knows what he will say. And anyway, she’s alive, isn’t she? These things are complicated, he’d told her early on, when she’d asked for a few more details. What matters is the end result: you get to live. For a long, long time.

Yes, she thinks now, but at what cost?

A CONVENIENT TARGET

May’s discovery, which was enough to make her sick, is actually just the tip of the iceberg.

Whistleblowers first sounded the alarm over systematic forced organ harvesting in 2006. One of them, a medical staff member in a northeastern Chinese hospital, told the Epoch Times that her neurosurgeon ex-husband removed corneas from detained Falun Gong practitioners and that the remains went straight to the incinerator for cremation. An independent people’s tribunal, chaired by war crimes prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, confirmed in 2019 that forced organ harvesting had been occurring across China under the state’s watch, with Falun Gong practitioners “used as a source, probably the principal source, of organs.” Falun Gong makes a convenient target. The spiritual practice, which drew about 70 million to 100 million people by the late 1990s, has been targeted by the regime since 1999. Its practitioners meditate daily, don’t smoke or drink, and aspire to a peaceful mindset – healthy lifestyle habits that researchers suggest have made their organs ideal for the organ transplant trade.

To avoid implicating their friends and families, many Falun Gong practitioners refuse to give their names when police officers detain them. And without official records, they are easy prey for the illicit organ trade, where secrecy is key. “There has been a population of donors accessible to hospitals in the [People’s Republic of China] whose organs could be extracted according to demand for them,” the tribunal said in its judgment. Chinese authorities, it states, “would have no difficulty in committing Falun Gong practitioners to any fate,” turning them into a ready donor pool.

One former Chinese official connected to organ harvesting, the overseer of the health department of the Chinese army logistics branch, told undercover investigators in 2014 that taking organs from Falun Gong practitioners was an order from the top.

A PROJECT TO COMBAT DEATH

Why? An elite obsession with longevity, survival, and rejuvenation. Chinese officials have eyed replacing organs as an option for rejuvenating life since the late 1970s, when China’s organ transplant industry was in its infancy. In 1978, according to a US-based Chinese-language magazine, now known as the China News Digest, medical workers harvested kidneys from a political prisoner right after execution. The organs went to the child of a high-ranking official who was suffering from kidney failure.

As the practice proliferated underground, regime leaders kept a tight lid on the health records of the political elite. Nonetheless, accounts of organ transplant surgeries on political dignitaries have trickled out over the years.

In 2023, the death of former Chinese Deputy Cultural Minister Gao Zhanxiang made headlines after an obituary inadvertently divulged that he had replaced “many organs.” The 87-year-old had changed so many body parts that he once joked that “many components are not his own any more,” the obituary read.

The historical lineage of projects aimed at boosting health and longevity dates back even further, almost to the party’s founding. As early as the late 1920s, while struggling to survive civil war in China, the fledgling Chinese communists already had a hospital for treating their top leadership. Not long after the communist party assumed control over China in 1949, the communist authorities began a 100-acre farm staffed with soldiers to supply fresh dairy and produce for officials near Jade Spring Hill, according to a Chinese state history magazine. The area, commonly known as the “back garden” of Chinese politics, is home to private villas of high-ranking military leaders.

The farm, the magazine article said, cultivated rare off-season foods that first party chief Mao Zedong enjoyed, such as seedless watermelon, which didn’t become commercially available until at least the late 1990s.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, injecting blood from young soldiers was a popular “tonic” for senior communist officials, Li Zhisui, the 22-year-long personal physician for Mao, wrote in his 1994 memoir, which was published in the United States and banned in China.

Whatever the latest fad in the hunt for longevity, one theme remained constant throughout the years: The ruling elite has always come first.

Chinese communist cadres get free premier health care in VIP patient wards; for those at the top, a select panel of nutrition experts deliberates on what they should eat, Chinese media reports show.

In 2006, Chinese state media quoted a former deputy Chinese health minister as saying that four-fifths of Chinese healthcare dollars serve the 85 million Chinese Communist Party members. The official later walked back the statement after a nationwide backlash. It’s unclear if was truth, or simply bluster.

“Protecting the leadership,” when it comes to health, is a national priority, a deeply-placed China source once told me.

Dr Ning Xiaowei, a cardiologist who worked in VIP wards at a major Chinese hospital, recalled that a deputy provincial official summoned specialists from the best hospitals across the entire province to treat an injury.

Ning said it was a textbook case of how the Chinese communist hierarchy works.

“The so-called people’s servants have the entire Chinese population serving them,” she told the Epoch Times.

The special treatment for the elites shows in the data.

In the late 1970s, when Chinese people lived to 68 years on average, the top communist statesmen reached their late 70s and 80s, an Epoch Times analysis of public data found.

One of the longest-living people in China’s modern history was Zhang Lixiong, a major general of the People’s Liberation Army. He died in April 2024 at the age of 110. Former State Councillor Song Ping, who is still alive, is 108 [Ed’s note: he died 4 March, 2026].

THE HOT MIC

The once-obscure and deeply secretive forced organ harvesting industry came into the public eye in 2025 after a hot mic moment between the Chinese and Russian leaders, who discussed the prospect of longevity via multiple organ transplants and made reference to a 150-year life span. Chinese state television captured the hot mic musings on Sept 3, 2025 as Chinese leader Xi Jinping escorted his Russian and North Korean counterparts to an enormous military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. “Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,” Xi told Russian President Vladimir Putin, prompting the latter, who, like Xi, is 72, to reference continued organ transplants as a key to immortality. “Predictions are that in this century, there’s a chance of living to 150,” Xi said just before the audio faded.

That longevity claim harks back to a one-minute ad in 2019 promoting the 301 Hospital in Beijing, China’s top military medical center dedicated to treating those in the top political circles.

“A 150-year lifespan project to combat death,” the voice over in the ad calls it.

The clip describes a health system decades in the making, combining the best of traditional Chinese medicine with Western technology. At one point, the voice over touts the system for the Chinese elite as “tried and true” and first rate, backing up the claim with a graph that depicts Chinese leaders outliving their American and British peers by at least a decade.

The bold declaration troubles medical ethicists.

“Sickness is not something that is turned on and off like a light switch,” Dr Torsten Trey, executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, told the Epoch Times. “It is one thing to talk about staying in power and becoming 150 years old. But how would they do that?”

A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

There are still many unanswered questions about China’s forced organ harvesting industry – questions with grave implications for the future of medicine, the future of morality, and the future of the free world.

But thanks to the tireless work of investigators, reporters, and unbelievably courageous Chinese whistleblowers, we know far more than we did two decades ago. We know for certain that Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and other groups are still being targeted. We know that the Chinese Communist Party will stop at nothing to ensure its own survival. And we know that Western elites and Western media are being steadily co-opted, and made complicit in the CCP’s crimes against humanity.

At the end of the day, that is what forced organ harvesting is, a crime against humanity, and we must not allow ourselves to forget the human element.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.