April 8, 2026 1 min

Episode 292A Crime the Modern World Prefers Not to See

With Jan Jekielek

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There is a moment in my conversation with Jan Jekielek —senior editor at The Epoch Times, host of American Thought Leaders, and author of the new book Killed to Order — when the abstract becomes concrete and stays that way.

My conversation with Jan Jekielek — and what it forced me to confront

There is a moment in my conversation with Jan Jekielek —senior editor at The Epoch Times, host of American Thought Leaders, and author of the new book Killed to Order — when the abstract becomes concrete and stays that way.

Jan is explaining how organ transplants work. The matching requirements, the tissue typing, the near impossibility of finding a compatible donor in time. The average wait: years. Sometimes forever.

Then he describes a patient who flew to Shanghai China and returned with a new heart in two weeks.

Scheduled. Matched in advance. Which means somewhere in a Chinese military hospital, a person had been catalogued — blood type, tissue type, organ scan — and was waiting to be killed on demand so that the organ arrived fresh.

That is what “killed to order” means.

Jan has been reporting on China’s forced organ harvesting industry for twenty years. His new book is the fullest account yet of what the Chinese Communist Party has built: a state-run industry that kills prisoners of conscience — primarily Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims — on demand, for paying transplant recipients from around the world. The independent China Tribunal, chaired by the prosecutor who tried Slobodan Milosevic, concluded in 2020 that this has been happening on a substantial scale, beyond reasonable doubt.

In our conversation, Jan covers the ground the book covers and more. We talk about how the CCP creates “black classes” — designated enemies stripped of humanity by state propaganda — and how Falun Gong, a meditation practice whose 70 to 100 million practitioners outnumber CCP members, became the primary victim population. We talk about Cheng Pei Ming, the first known survivor of forced organ harvesting, body-scanned and found to be missing part of his liver and lung, with a fourteen-inch scar to show for it. We talk about the hot mic moment at a Tiananmen military parade where Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that, through continuous organ transplantation, they might achieve immortality.

We also talk about us — about how the West financed China’s rise while telling itself a liberalizing story that the CCP was always happy to encourage. Jan is clear-eyed about what that cost and honest about where it leads.

I came away from this conversation — and from reading his book — with a question I could not put down. Jan argues, carefully, that this is the CCP’s crime, not China’s. He is right to make that distinction. But the deeper question is what made China uniquely susceptible: the philosophical traditions that preceded the Party, and what Mao deliberately destroyed to clear the ground. I explore that in the reflection below.

This is a hard subject. Jan makes it impossible to look away — which is exactly the point.

Watch or listen. Then read what I wrote.

PERSONAL REFLECTION

What Mao Made

There is a hospital in Shanghai where foreign patients arrive, submit blood samples, and receive a matched kidney within days. Not months. Not years. Days. As Jan Jekielek explains in Killed to Order — and as he told me in the conversation above — this is not medicine. It is logistics. Which means somewhere nearby, a person has been scheduled to die so that the organ arrives fresh.

We want to call this an atrocity. It is. But atrocity is not an explanation. The harder question is how a civilization arrives at this — how a country that gave the world Confucius, the Tang dynasty, and some of the most sophisticated moral philosophy in human history ends up running an industrial murder operation as a healthcare product.

The answer is not simply the Chinese Communist Party, though the Party bears full responsibility for what it has done. The answer requires going further back — to a philosophical fault line that runs beneath Chinese civilization, and to what happened when Mao deliberately dynamited the structures that held it in check.

— — —

Most Westerners who think about Chinese philosophy think Confucianism: hierarchy, filial piety, social harmony, the web of duties that connects children to parents, subjects to rulers, individuals to their communities. That tradition is real and it is rich. But underneath it — and often more operative in Chinese statecraft — runs a colder tradition called Legalism.

Legalism was the philosophy of the First Emperor, who unified China in 221 BC. Its premise is simple and brutal: the state is the supreme sovereign, law is a tool of state power, and human beings have no inherent worth apart from their usefulness to the ruler. There is no natural law above the emperor. No divine authority to appeal to. No rights the state is obligated to respect. The body itself belongs to the sovereign.

The Chinese imperial tradition was never purely one or the other. Confucian ethics, Buddhism, Taoism — these provided real moral counterweights to pure Legalist power. Temples and monasteries, the concept of ren — humaneness — the ritual obligations between rulers and ruled. They were not the individual rights tradition of the West. But they were a genuine moral architecture. They drew a circle of obligation around human beings and placed some limits, however imperfect, on what the state could do to them.

Mao understood this. He also understood that those structures stood between him and total power.

— — —

The Cultural Revolution was not chaos. It was a campaign.

Between 1966 and 1976, the Red Guards did not merely attack Western-influenced intellectuals or class enemies in the Marxist sense. They attacked Chinese civilization itself — systematically, deliberately, and with Mao’s blessing. Temples burned. Buddhist monasteries shuttered. Confucian scholars paraded in dunce caps through the streets. The accumulated moral inheritance of two thousand years — the rituals, the texts, the institutions, the habits of reverence — was targeted for destruction.

In our conversation, Jan pointed me to the opening scene of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem as perhaps the most accurate cinematic rendering of what a struggle session actually looked like: a scientist told to deny reality and pledge fealty to the Party, who refuses, and is killed in front of his daughter. Jan’s point was about the nihilism the Party engenders — hatred of humanity, in his words — and how that nihilism becomes the cultural inheritance of everyone who survives. I kept thinking about the daughter watching. That is the point of a struggle session. Not to convert. To break.

The stated reason for the Cultural Revolution was that the old culture oppressed the masses. The real reason was simpler. Every living moral tradition represents a competing authority. A man with genuine religious conviction, or deep filial obligation, or a scholar’s loyalty to classical truth, is a man who has something to answer to besides the Party. Mao could not tolerate that. So he burned the temples and imprisoned the monks and sent the scholars to re-education camps, and when it was over, the field was clear.

What you are left with, after you burn the moral counterweights from a Legalist state tradition, is not freedom. It is not even emptiness. It is the Legalist core — raw, unrestrained, and now dressed in Marxist materialism that denies the soul, denies the transcendent, and insists that a human being is exactly what he can be measured to be worth.

From there to organ harvesting is not a leap. It is a conclusion.

— — —

The Falun Gong practitioners who are killed for their kidneys are not dying because of an ideology imported from Europe. They are dying because a very old Chinese idea — that the state owns the body — was stripped of every moral constraint that had softened it for centuries, and then handed to men who learned their ethics from a system that rewards sociopathy and punishes conscience.

The CCP did not create this out of nothing. It found something that was already there, amplified it, and destroyed everything that stood against it. That distinction matters because it tells us what has to be rebuilt. Not just the political system. The entire moral inheritance that Mao incinerated.

— — —

Here is where it stops being about China.

America is not China. But we are watching something proceed on our own soil that rhymes with what the Cultural Revolution did — more slowly, more gently, in the language of justice rather than class struggle, but with the same architectural logic: identify the inherited moral structures, name them as oppression, and take them apart.

Classical education has largely vanished from schools. Religious practice and the moral vocabulary it carries are being squeezed from public life. The family as the primary unit of moral formation is under steady institutional pressure. The distinction between citizen and state — which is not a recent invention but the hard-won inheritance of centuries — is eroding in ways that are treated as progress.

Jan and I talked about de Tocqueville, who saw America’s extraordinary capacity for self-organization — churches, clubs, civic associations, the whole apparatus of civil society — as the secret of its freedom. That infrastructure is not merely social. It is moral. It stands between the individual and the state. The CCP understood this perfectly, which is why it destroyed China’s equivalent with such thoroughness. We are dismantling ours with considerably less awareness of what we are doing.

We are not burning temples. We are defunding them, regulating them, mocking them, and replacing them with a thin administrative ethic that speaks entirely in the language of grievance and control. The result is not liberation. The result is a field that has been cleared.

Cleared fields do not stay empty. They are available for whoever arrives next with a system.

— — —

Jekielek ends his book with a plea: do not confuse the CCP with the Chinese people. He is right. Chinese civilization is magnificent, and its people are the Party’s greatest victims. What Mao destroyed was theirs first.

But the lesson for us is not merely about China. It is about the relationship between a civilization and its moral inheritance — the accumulated architecture of obligation, restraint, and reverence that holds Legalist logic at bay. That architecture is not self-maintaining. It requires transmission, protection, and the willingness to defend it when the argument for tearing it down sounds, as it always does, like progress.

A civilization that does not know what it has inherited does not know what it is losing.

Mao knew exactly what he was burning. That is why he burned it.

Featured Guest

In this conversation

Jan Jekielek

Jan Jekielek

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders.” Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He…

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