What happens when a government is accused of turning human beings into inventory?

That is the disturbing question at the center of journalist Jan Jekielek’s work on China’s alleged forced organ harvesting system, a practice he describes not as isolated abuse but as an organized, industrial machine built around prisoners of conscience. In his recent book Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary, Jekielek compiles two decades of investigations, witness accounts, tribunal findings, and testimony surrounding allegations that people in Chinese custody have been killed for their organs.

Jekielek is a senior editor at The Epoch Times, a China researcher, and a New York Times best selling author whose reporting has focused heavily on the Chinese Communist Party and human rights abuses. Speaking ahead of a Toronto book event, he argued that understanding the alleged organ harvesting system is essential to understanding what he called the “true nature” of the Chinese regime. According to Jekielek, the Chinese Communist Party “don’t believe in win-win at all. In fact, their whole effort is an attempt to subvert.”

A System That Allegedly Became Industrial

The allegations surrounding forced organ harvesting first exploded into public view in 2006, when reports surfaced that prisoners of conscience in China were being used as involuntary organ sources. A whistleblower disclosed that her ex husband, a surgeon, allegedly admitted transplanting approximately 2,000 corneas taken from living detainees. What sounded impossible or conspiratorial to many observers slowly became the subject of international tribunals, investigations, and testimony.

In 2019, an independent tribunal in London chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC concluded there was evidence forced organ harvesting had taken place in China “on a significant scale,” identifying practitioners of Falun Gong as one of the primary sources of organs. Tribunal findings described what investigators believed was a system that became systematic after the Chinese Communist Party launched a brutal campaign against Falun Gong in 1999.

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline centered on meditation and moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. By the late 1990s, government estimates reportedly placed its followers between 70 and 100 million. Chinese authorities allegedly viewed its popularity as a threat and launched a campaign to eliminate it. Reports followed of imprisonment, torture, forced labor, indoctrination, surveillance, killings, and eventually allegations of live organ harvesting.

Jekielek argues the alleged harvesting system was “built on the backs of Falun Gong practitioners” and later expanded after years passed with little international pushback. According to him, Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang also became targets as China expanded its transplant system. He warned that persecution of Christians in China is increasing and expressed “a genuine fear that this could spread to another group as well.”

Ethical organ transplants usually require long waits because organs must come from compatible donors, often people who have only recently died. In many countries, patients wait years.

But investigators point to a disturbing anomaly in China. In the early 2000s, advertisements reportedly promised organs in as little as two weeks. Patients allegedly paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for transplant surgeries and returned home for aftercare shortly afterward. To critics, such short wait times suggested something horrifying: a supply of living people whose deaths could allegedly be timed to demand.

Tribunal lawyer Hamid Sabi reportedly told the United Nations that victims were “killed to order,” describing allegations that detainees were cut open while still alive so organs such as kidneys, hearts, lungs, corneas, skin, and livers could be removed and sold. He described the allegations as one of the century’s worst atrocities and argued governments have a legal duty to respond.

Raymond Zhang and the Human Cost

Award winning filmmaker Raymond Zhang has spent nearly twenty years investigating what he calls China’s “most secret state crime.” In his documentary State Organs, Zhang presents testimony he believes reveals the unbearable human reality behind statistics and headlines.

Zhang said hearing from Dr. George Zheng changed him forever.

“In 2006, when I first heard about organ harvesting, I was shocked but not that surprised,” Zhang said. “But in 2016, when I first met Dr. George Zheng, I was utterly shocked. The degree of the cruelty of the organ harvesting is beyond imagination.”

Dr. Zheng described being summoned to what he called a secret military mission involving a teenage soldier who had fallen out of favor with superiors. According to Zhang’s account, military officials allegedly determined the 17 year old detainee matched a high ranking official who needed organs.

“The army decided to kill this boy for his two kidneys and one eyeball,” Zhang said. “His parents probably never knew what happened to their kid.”

Dr. Zheng remembered seeing terror in the boy’s face.

“When I looked at him, I saw fear in his eyes. His eyelids were moving. He was alive.” He said “there was no anesthesia” and recalled blood pouring out while vessels continued “pulsating and trembling” as organs were removed.

The film also includes testimony from a police officer who said he witnessed a Falun Gong woman pleading for mercy before an alleged forced organ extraction. According to his account, she cried, “Falun Dafa is good. You can kill me alone. You can’t kill hundreds of millions of people for their faith.” He said officials nodded for the procedure to continue.

Death Vans and a Growing Global Response

Among the most chilling allegations are reports of so called “death vans,” mobile execution chambers introduced in China in the late 1990s. Disguised as ordinary buses, the vehicles reportedly contain lethal injection facilities where executions can happen quickly and secretly. Human rights groups argue the vans make organ removal easier because bodies remain fresh and organs can allegedly be extracted immediately after execution. Critics say the secrecy strips away due process, replacing courts and accountability with silence and fear.

Growing alarm has sparked international action. By December 2025, 505,970 people across 34 countries had signed a petition launched by Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting and the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China. The petition calls on governments including the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to condemn forced organ harvesting, demand its end, investigate abuses, and discourage transplant tourism to China. Organizers say the movement reflects a refusal to remain silent in the face of what they describe as industrialized cruelty.