The Karol Markowicz Show: Inside China’s Organ Harvesting Horror: Jan Jekielek on “Killed to Order” & CCP Crimes
4/8/202621 mincomplete
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0:17Call 844 -844 -iHeart. Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeart
0:28Radio. My guest today is Jan Ukelec.
0:31Jan is an Epoch Times senior editor, host of American Thought Leaders, and the author
0:36of the excellent new book and New York Times bestseller, Killed to Order.
0:40Buy it anywhere you buy your books.
0:42Hi, Jan. So nice to have you on.
0:45Oh, I'm thrilled to be here.
0:46I'm thrilled to have the tables turned, so to speak.
0:50I love that. I loved our interview when you interviewed me for my book.
0:54I'm reading Killed to Order.
0:55I'm so loving it. Tell me about the impetus to write Killed to Order.
1:00So, I mean, it's an issue, this forced organ harvesting, the Chinese Communist Party's forced
1:06organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience at scale is something that I've been covering for
1:1120 years. I've done, I did some of the original reporting on it back in
1:15the day. There's actually kind of a crazy moment where there was a press event
1:20at Auschwitz, actually around it, that I was involved in.
1:24And that was kind of, again, the beginnings of this reporting.
1:28And I'm very, I've always been interested, this is going to sound a bit weird,
1:31but I've always been interested in crimes against humanity.
1:34My father -in -law was a Holocaust survivor.
1:36Unfortunately, he passed a couple of years ago.
1:39And it's just, I've just been sort of deeply thinking over the years why humanity
1:45can do such horrible things to itself, right?
1:48And this has just kind of been an area of study for me.
1:50And this organ industry, you know, one of the great researchers of it, David Matus,
1:56called it an evil yet to be seen on this planet.
1:59It's a very extreme thing.
2:01And, you know, how does it happen?
2:02How are we involved? Are we complicit in some ways?
2:05The answer is yes, by the way.
2:07And how do you stop something like this once it gets moving?
2:11These are all things that are, you know, very, very close to my heart.
2:14And this book, I mean, it's just a kind of a miracle that there's this
2:17level of interest in it now, all of a sudden, on an issue that most
2:21people, honestly, they would, people would clue out in the middle of conversations that I
2:26would tell them about this, okay?
2:27I, after a while, I stopped feeling bad about it.
2:29And I felt sympathetic because, you know, it was really, it's really horrible.
2:33Yeah. I was going to ask, do you have a hard time getting people to
2:37believe that something like this could be happening?
2:39It sounds like science fiction.
2:41For years, it was like this.
2:43And something happened, I think it's COVID years, actually.
2:48And there's also, there's, there are two things that happen and they're kind of overlapping.
2:51But one is, we watched people get welded into their homes in China during COVID,
2:56right? We saw what a totalitarian regime does to, you know, with its zero sum
3:02thinking, right? Zero COVID policy.
3:05And I think that opened up people's minds a little bit.
3:07And also just the fact that, that they kind of lied about its transmissibility.
3:11That opened up people's minds.
3:13But also there's a, against all odds, I never really thought we'd ever see one
3:17of these, but there's a survivor that basically came forth probably about three years ago
3:22now. And I never thought we'd ever see one because it's so easy to just
3:27kind of kill the person once you've taken organs.
3:30Or in most cases, the person is killed through the organs being removed.
3:33So the fact that there's a survivor of it is astonishing.
3:36And that also created a bit more press, mostly in the UK, unfortunately.
3:40But also that did shift the conversation a bit.
3:42So today, most people, I don't find a lot of people that say, I don't
3:47believe. Most people say, oh my God, that's horrible.
3:50You know, what can I do?
3:51Or something like that. So there's been a shift in consciousness.
3:54It's so interesting. So how are we complicit?
3:57We train some of the surgeons that do it.
4:00I mean, Carol, it might be worth it for me just to explain how this
4:04works and how it's different than your run -of -the -mill, also really horrible, you
4:09know, organ trafficking that we see in different parts of the world.
4:13So you need a state actor.
4:15It can only happen, and in this case, that's the Chinese Communist Party.
4:18And the reason you need a state actor is you need to be able to
4:21push massive, coercive power through a population and for two reasons.
4:26One is propaganda, okay? So the CCP has been expert over decades, right?
4:32Yeah. Basically, creating Black classes, okay?
4:37And a Black class is a group that the regime designates as a problem and
4:41then basically says, these people are dangerous or these people are lesser than you.
4:47It's a whole process of dehumanizing the group.
4:50And for instance, they wanted to seize all the land from the landowners, right?
4:53They said landowners are the cause of all our problems.
4:55And then it actually activates a quirk in our psychology that allows us to at
5:01least allow for, or in some cases even participate, in doing really bad things to
5:05a group of people. So it started with the landowners, but that wasn't the last
5:08Black class. There were all sorts of groups along the way.
5:11In 1989, it was the student movement, right?
5:14They got quelled under the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
5:17And again, they said, oh, it was the students attacked the military.
5:22Right, right, yeah. Anyway, and so in...
5:251999, I'll just to kind of as part of the setup here, right?
5:29There was a group called Falun Gong.
5:31Falun Gong practitioners, it was a very, very popular spiritual discipline in China.
5:36Truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. This is what people are living when they do it.
5:40But it's not something like an organization like we would typically think of, like there's
5:46no hierarchy in it. There's no sort of collection of funds.
5:49There's no roster, like you don't join something.
5:51There's no worship. But there's a strong, deep spirituality.
5:55And the people, and it grew to 70 to 100 million people doing it by
5:59word of mouth all across China.
6:01One in 13 Chinese, basically.
6:03And the regime decided, uh -oh, this is bigger than the Chinese Communist Party.
6:07I remember this, yeah. Yeah, no, no, exactly.
6:10And so the dictator at the time decided to wipe it out.
6:14He said eradicate it, to use his kind of off -the -books word.
6:18Yeah. And when they put people into this program of a black class, if you
6:24will, they put them in the re -education camps and the prisons, all sorts of
6:29things, to try to break them.
6:31It wasn't about killing everybody, by the way.
6:32Not necessarily. It was about breaking them, having them renounce what they believed.
6:37But these people proved to be very resilient to this.
6:40Right. And this is where the second condition to get killed to order, by the
6:44way, the name of my book is, that's why I'm calling it killed to order
6:47organ harvesting. They incarcerated a million, maybe two million people, a huge amount of people.
6:54Like 2005, half of all the people in the massive Chinese incarceration system were Falun
6:58Gong practitioners, per the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
7:01So massive, okay? So now you have a very, you have a dehumanized population that's
7:07in the system, and they're resilient to this brainwashing.
7:10So they make this rule that all Falun Gong deaths will be considered suicides in
7:15the system. Basically, it means you can work on these people as far as it
7:18takes to break them, or if they die, well, too bad, right?
7:21Yeah. So a really particularly dehumanized group of people.
7:25Now, another important piece, in an ethical transplant situation, there has to be a catastrophic
7:32accident. Someone, let's say I need a heart, okay?
7:35Right. Someone needs to actually have a car accident or a motorcycle accident.
7:40And the other part is they need to actually match us a little bit, because
7:44our bodies reject things that are foreign, including organs, if they're too different.
7:48So they match around blood type and tissue type and size, okay?
7:53And the combination of all of that is rare.
7:55That's why people wait months or years in many cases.
7:58Exactly, right? But in China, this is what one of the whistleblowers, you know, right
8:03around the time when I was starting to understand this was real, I was basically
8:07hit over the head by the evidence.
8:08One of the whistleblowers, head of the Israeli Transplant Association at one point, he was
8:13a professor of transplant surgery at Tel Aviv University, heart transplant surgeon.
8:18He had a patient that told him, who had a really bad heart condition, I'm
8:22tired of waiting for my transplant, I'm going to China, and I'm getting it done
8:25in two weeks. Wow. Scheduled.
8:27Yeah. Okay? So now, massive red flags, right?
8:31Number one, scheduled. That catastrophic accident is being arranged.
8:35Right. So someone's being killed.
8:37And number two, two weeks, how do you get that?
8:40Well, this is what they did.
8:41They blood typed and tissue type and organ scanned the people in this massive incarceration
8:46system, the Falun Gong practitioners, and they created a database of all their vitals.
8:51So now when someone would come with their $100 ,000 or $200 ,000 for an
8:54organ, because this is the kind of money they would charge, right, to get it
8:57in two weeks, right, you already have a prisoner of conscience in prison pre -matched,
9:03right? Because there's so many of them.
9:05There's one that actually meets the criteria, and that person can be shipped and killed
9:09to order. And that's the reason my book is titled Killed to Order.
9:13That is the creepiest thing I've ever heard.
9:16Is there a sense that, I feel like Americans sometimes when they hear about what's
9:21going on in China, like a story like this, they almost like shake it off,
9:24like, oh, that's China. What are you going to do?
9:25That's just how it goes over there.
9:27Is this breaking through to Americans how horrible and uniquely evil this is?
9:34Well, it is finally, apparently, right?
9:38And this is like against all odds, you know, on the New York Times and
9:41Publishers Weekly bestseller lists, right?
9:44So it is breaking through.
9:45But to answer your initial question is, how are we complicit?
9:49We actually train some of these surgeons, okay?
9:53We provide technologies, solutions. We have funding relationships with both hospitals and universities.
10:00We have all sorts of deep engagement with their transplant system, all the while knowing
10:05that two -week transplants are possible.
10:07I mean, this is really not right.
10:09And at the very, as a very first step, we can say, no, on this
10:13issue, I'm not an isolationist.
10:15I'm not into like no communication or something like that.
10:19But on an issue where, you know, something that almost certainly is a crime against
10:23humanity is happening. We're talking about 60 to 90 ,000 transplants per year, by the
10:28way, Carol. So this is big scale, just a few organs, right?
10:32So we don't need to be part of that, at the very least, right?
10:37But that's where the complicity is.
10:39And the other part, right?
10:40And I actually have a whole chapter in my book about this, right?
10:43It's about this complicity. The CCP is expert at making both its own population complicit
10:49in its crimes and us in other ways, right?
10:52And this is... When you have this deep relationship and you have it over, you
10:55know, this has been happening for 25 odd years, as far as we know, 2026
10:59at least, right? And so, you know, when the big transplant organizations like TTS, they
11:05didn't really do anything, didn't even make a statement about it for so long.
11:08Now you're saying all of a sudden you're like, oh, yeah, this is happening.
11:12No, generally these big bureaucracies will try to kind of push it under the carpet.
11:16Otherwise, it makes it seem like now they're complicit, right?
11:19So the complicity is created through having people not say anything for a while.
11:25And then now they kind of become part of the lie, right?
11:28Part of the secret or something like that.
11:30There's many ways they make us complicit, but that's one of them.
11:33Have you seen a shift from any of these organizations?
11:35Is there a chance that they're going to say anything?
11:39Well, there's a few that have.
11:41And for example, there's the ISHLT.
11:44That's the group that for International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.
11:48So they have a statement of a few years ago that they will not take
11:52any papers from China for research in this field.
11:57I mean, that's a strong gutsy.
11:59And I say gutsy because no one else is willing to do it almost.
12:02But there's a few, right?
12:05But that would be an example of it.
12:07So it's starting to happen.
12:08But then there's groups like, and I don't, there's many transplant associations that simply in
12:14effect have kind of run cover for it.
12:15And just sort of, you know, and again, you can imagine how they do it.
12:19Again, how this complicity works.
12:20Like, this is what they'll tell you.
12:22The person on the Chinese side will be like, listen, we're, I'm one of the
12:26reformers. You're a reformer. Yeah, we've had some problems with transplantation, but we're working on
12:31changing. Let's work together on this.
12:33There's those hardliners over there.
12:35They're really nasty. We don't want them to take the reins, right?
12:37I've got the reins right now, but if you raise a fuss, if you say
12:40anything, those hardliners, they're going to take control.
12:43And we wouldn't want that, right?
12:45But really, they're actually working in cahoots.
12:47Of course, yeah. And just with the intention of not changing anything.
12:50And this has just been a standard rinse and repeat method.
12:53Very, works very well on, well, I mean, they took advantage of our gullibility, but
12:58also to be fair of our greed, among other things.
13:02Yeah. We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol
13:05Markowitz Show. Call 844 -844 -IHEART to get started.
13:35That's 844 -844 -IHEART. Jan, did you always want to be an investigative journalist?
13:43I was an evolutionary biologist in a previous life.
13:47So I guess I was always, I liked investigating things.
13:51Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
13:53You know, COVID, actually, it really helped during COVID because I could read papers a
13:57lot easier than the average person.
13:59Yeah. Amazing. What are you most proud of in your life?
14:04My God, you know, it might be this.
14:08Like, I don't know. I mean, just the issue is that we kind of worked
14:14on this with really not a lot of hope, if that makes sense, right?
14:18Like a lot of people at the beginning, people are just like, this is, why
14:22do you hate China? You know, the propaganda was thick.
14:27Not that I would say, like, why do you hate China?
14:29But if you had told me, like, hey, I'm planning to write a book about,
14:32you know, the organ harvesting that's going on in China, I would have been like,
14:36you're never going to get into there.
14:38You're never going to get in there and find out what's really going on.
14:40They're so secretive. It's such a wall, but you did it.
14:44So I get why you'd be proud.
14:46It's very hard. And, you know, there's a number.
14:49So one of the things I do in the book, I'm not the hero researcher,
14:52by the way. I'll just tell that to be transparent with you about that.
14:55There's probably two handfuls of people that have put their entire lives.
15:00I mean, I've covered it for 25 years on and off.
15:03But so there's people that, you know, there's another guy named Ethan Gutman, actually, who
15:07just has a new book out.
15:09It's called The Xinjiang Procedure, which is looking at the question of how this is
15:13being done on Uyghur Muslims in the Northwest.
15:16And by the way, I should mention this, Carol, this is a real tragedy, because
15:19for 14 or 15 years, they grew this starting in 2000.
15:23It was low level prating.
15:25They grew massive hospital system, massive transplantation between 2000, 2005 was the bulk of that
15:30big growth. And then, you know, by the end of the 2000s, that's when you
15:34get to that 60 to 90 ,000 transplant per year number.
15:37And it's kind of and and I think Ethan Gutman, actually, he defended in front
15:43of Congress, his number is 60 to 100 ,000 transplants per year.
15:47He explained how he got that number.
15:49You can actually look up the congressional testimony.
15:51But then there were 146 hospitals, I believe, that had been built doing this kind
15:56of killed to order. And and but that number is only increased.
16:00And at the same since then, and and they added the Uyghurs.
16:04So when nobody really did anything over such a long time, right, they just said,
16:08oh, look, it's apparently the the world, this never again thing in the Genocide Commission
16:13doesn't really mean anything, does it?
16:14So they added they dehumanized the Uyghur people.
16:17They added them as the next group.
16:19And now I'm. actually concerned because I'm seeing dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians happening.
16:25And there's actually Christian, you know, sort of.
16:28Right. It seems like that would be the natural next group.
16:31It does. And I don't know that that's for sure what's going to happen.
16:35I just do know that this dehumanize, this uptick in dehumanization always will happen when
16:41you're starting to work on a group of people because you kind of have to
16:44convince the population that at least in part, that it's OK to treat these people
16:49horribly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, totalitarian societies usually do that very, very well.
16:55They are able to otherize groups quickly and pretty efficiently.
17:00So I I can see China heading towards doing this to Christians fairly easily.
17:06It's a feat. And this is the key part.
17:08So, you know, the subtitle of the book is, you know, Kill to Order, China's
17:12Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary.
17:16And I hope I think it's pretty convincingly argue that what exactly that process that
17:21you're describing, that's a feature of the system, not a bug.
17:24That's just how it works.
17:25The atrocities that happen are actually a feature, not a bug.
17:29They're kind of guaranteed given how the system actually works and how it prioritizes, for
17:35example, the survival of the party over basic human life.
17:39Yeah. And I ask all of my guests to give me a five year out
17:42prediction, and it could be about anything at all.
17:45Give us what you're thinking five years out from now.
17:48Okay. I'm going to put on my super optimist hat on.
17:52I love that hat. Okay.
17:52Yeah. And five years down the road, the Chinese Communist Party has collapsed.
17:59Wow. The Chinese people, the long suffering, you know, I always say that the biggest
18:05enemy of the Chinese Communist Party, in their mind, is the Chinese people themselves.
18:10They view them, in a sense, with contempt and as a tool for their own
18:15power. And, you know, China is starting to become a major real competitor, not a
18:22parasitic system like it is now, but like an actual major competitor.
18:26One stereotype of Chinese people is that they work their butts off.
18:30And it really is true.
18:31It's a cultural habit. You see it in Taiwan as well, which is a free
18:36society. And suddenly America, I feel like we've had it a little bit too good
18:40for too long. And I think they'll give us a run for their money, a
18:44true free society of China.
18:46Americans will be like, oh, man, we better get our butts in gear because these
18:49guys are really taken off.
18:50So that's what I'm hoping for.
18:52Yeah, that's very optimistic. A free China and an America encouraged to do better because
18:57of a competitor who, you know, would be somebody worthy.
19:01I think that's a great place to be.
19:05And I think and I talk about ways in which that could happen, actually, and
19:09in the book too, a little bit.
19:10So I love it. Jan, I love this conversation.
19:13I've always been a fan of yours.
19:15I think you're just fantastic.
19:17Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve
19:22their lives. Wow. OK, well, first of all, go to kill to order dot com
19:28and get the book. Easy call.
19:29No, no, no. So but why will that improve your life?
19:33Because it is a dark subject.
19:34OK, I think it will help you understand what we're really dealing with.
19:39And I think our biggest problem in a way has been we don't fully we
19:42didn't fully grasp the depths of darkness that this regime goes, how it thinks its
19:48mind. Right. And I think that my key goal in this book is not even
19:52so much the organ industry, but actually this true nature and understanding it.
19:56So I think that'll better our lives massively if we can sort of face them
19:59just rationally and with full understanding.
20:03So that would be that would be one piece.
20:05But another piece I would say is, I mean, this is going to this is
20:09a little bit cliche, but it really is important.
20:12Ask yourself, what is it that you're grateful for today?
20:16And sit on that for a couple of minutes and think about it.
20:18And it just it's the most wonderful thing to do every day.
20:21I make a point of it because you realize that you have a lot more,
20:25especially when you're having those bad days when nothing's going right.
20:28You realize, wait a sec, my life's a bit better than I just thought.
20:31It gives you perspective. So that's what I would recommend.
20:34Jan, I love that. He is Jan Jukolek.
20:37Check him out at Epoch Times and buy his book, Killed to Order, anywhere you
20:41buy your books. Thank you so much, Jan.
20:44Thanks so much, Carol. It's been a thrill.
20:46Bye -bye.