For more than 20 years, international action to stop the Chinese communist regime’s industrial-scale practice of forced organ harvesting has remained limited.

Experts say this is due, in part, to the crime’s unbelievable nature and the sheer volume of piecemeal evidence.

“When I first heard about it, I didn’t want to believe it. I just felt revulsion,” Jan Jekielek said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” where he took the interviewee’s seat for the first time with guest host Rob Schneider.

“I already knew what the Chinese Communist Party was capable of, broadly, but I didn’t want to accept that this could be happening, because it’s so extreme.”

Jekielek’s upcoming book “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary” will be released on March 17. It pulls together the most compelling evidence amassed over the past 20 years to expose a crime that continues to grow.

What began as a project to extend the lifespans of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites took a sinister turn after then-dictator Jiang Zemin ordered the “eradication” of a peaceful spiritual discipline practiced by one in 13 Chinese people.

Suddenly, a regime with no moral limits, already accused of funding unethical medical experimentation, had at its disposal millions of incarcerated prisoners of conscience.

Spike in Chinese Transplants

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered around the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. Jekielek, a Falun Gong practitioner himself, outlines in his book the circumstances in which the practice rose to popularity in China and the subsequent persecution, at the start of which the CCP branded practitioners as enemies of the state overnight.

In the early 2000s, reports emerged from Falun Gong practitioners claiming that they had received unknown injections and undergone blood tests while imprisoned for their faith.

It was not until a whistleblower in 2006 disclosed that her ex-husband, a surgeon, had admitted to transplanting some 2,000 corneas from live prisoners of conscience that independent investigators were led to the source of the spike in Chinese organ transplants: Falun Gong practitioners.

“I remember in 2005, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, there was the special rapporteur on torture. His name was Manfred Nowak. He estimated that half of all the people in the entire system [incarcerated in China] were Falun Gong practitioners,” Jekielek said.

“They built this on the backs of the Falun Gong, starting in 2000. The whole Chinese transplant industry grows geometrically from 2000 to 2005.

“By the end of the 2000s, we’ve got [60,000] to 90,000 transplants a year being done. That’s the best estimate, that’s the range. It’s very hard to estimate. This is a state secret. They don’t have statistics. They pretend it’s not happening.”

For comparison, Jekielek said, the United States hit a record number of organ transplants in 2024 at 48,149.

There are indications that as the Chinese regime has grown its transplant industry and expertise, it has targeted more dissidents to serve as unwilling sources of organs.

One example is the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, which is already undergoing what the United States has designated a genocide, as the CCP systemically erases Uyghur culture.

“I hate even saying this, but there actually is a global market for what they call ‘halal organs,’” Jekielek said.

Industrial Scale System

Schneider and Jekielek compared the CCP’s organ harvesting system to the Holocaust, saying that before the surgeon picks up the scalpel, thousands of people have to be involved in order to perpetuate such crimes on a national scale.

“It’s not just the transplant surgeons, it’s everybody else in the system,” Jekielek said. “There’s a lot of people that need to participate in order to achieve an organ transplantation situation.”

Schneider expressed disbelief that this program has managed to survive up to the present.

“This being exposed is the only chance we have to stop this and save these Uyghurs and Falun Gong members from this continual involuntary organ transplantation and the murder of a massive, massive amount of human beings,” Schneider said. “I think it’s one of the [greatest] evils ever.

“The requiring of somebody’s death for your survival, to me, is the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard in medicine.

“This abuse, with killing on demand, kill to order, is something that is unique in the history of humanity.”

“Killed to Order” will be released on March 17. It is currently available for pre-order.