The National Interest - The World Is Facing Horrors in China—and Looking Away - April 14, 2026 - By: Filip Styczynski

 

The National Interest 

Topic: Crime, and Human Rights

Region: Asia

Tags: Books, China, Chinese Communist Party, East Asia, Falun Dafa, and Organ Harvesting

The World Is Facing Horrors in China—and Looking Away

April 14, 2026

By: Filip Styczynski

China’s human rights abuses can no longer be denied. Evidently, however, they can be ignored.

Jan Jekielek, Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. (New York: Skyhorse Publishing) 264 pp., $32.99.

“I cannot believe what you have told me,” Felix Frankfurter, a US Supreme Court justice and a strong supporter of the American Jewish Congress, said in 1943 to Jan Karski after reading his report on Nazi Germany’s ongoing extermination of the Jews in occupied Poland.

Karski, a courier in the Polish resistance, had arrived in America earlier that year—sent by the Polish government-in-exile in London to the United States to deliver a secret report to the American government and press. That report was based on information gathered by Polish underground informants inside Auschwitz and other German extermination camps; it included detailed descriptions of the treatment of Jews and other minorities, the abysmal conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Nazi program of genocide.

While in the United States, Karski met with senior officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Frankfurter. Despite the urgency of his mission, however, many American decision-makers did not fully grasp or believe the scale of his revelations. Karski’s warnings were often met with disbelief or dismissed as exaggerated war propaganda, and the report’s coverage by the American press was limited. It was only at the end of the war, when Allied troops liberated the Nazi death camps and saw the horrors within with their own eyes, that the true scope of the Holocaust became known to all.

Why did it take so long, when the information was available in 1943? In trying to determine why leading thinkers in the West did not believe the initial reports about what was going on in Auschwitz, the clearest reason was put into words by Frankfurter: the truth was simply too horrible for most to accept.

Nearly a century later, the Holocaust is an established fact, and Holocaust education is compulsory in schools around the globe. That education is accompanied by the adage “Never again”: the civilized world cannot afford to ignore another genocide. Nevertheless, if history were to repeat itself—if someone presented a report like Karski’s to the public, documenting mass murder being conducted in broad daylight—how would we react? Would we dismiss it as propaganda, or would we have the moral courage to believe it?

“Killed to Order” Links Chinese Communism and Mass Murder

Killed to Order, by Jan Jekielek, presents an unflinching, comprehensive report on the ongoing persecution of Falun Dafa adherents in China—including the well-documented practice of harvesting the organs of its practitioners. Yet it also attempts to provide an answer to this question, as Jekielek himself struggled with it for years.

Jekielek starts the book in Frankfurter’s position. He describes feeling the same feeling Frankfurter felt when he first heard about forced organ harvesting in China from an eyewitness.

“Rumors and whispers of forcible organ harvesting from prisoners in China had been circulating among different dissident groups for a while,” Jekielek wrote. “But I’d never taken these stories entirely seriously, hoping they were simply exaggerations… I simply couldn’t accept that [the] story could possibly be real. It sounded too fantastical, too implausible, too evil.”

Killed to Order describes China’s organ harvesting business in gory detail. Though the author’s fiercely anti-communist outlook is clear, the book is not a political screed; it is meticulous in its research and convincing in its sourcing. Jekielek tracks the organ chain from the bottom to the highest circles of the Chinese communist apparatus. Within the book, one can read testimonies from Chinese surgeons, survivors, former communist officials, and foreign transplant specialists who were exposed to the practice while in China.

What really draws attention to Jekielik’s work is not only the explanation of how organ harvesting works in China and what atrocities are committed along the way, but also how, through this example, one can see how Chinese communism functions. He shows that it is a living, breathing system, rather than a relic of old times that has given way to technocratic capitalism in practice, as many in the West assert.

What Is Falun Dafa?

China’s relationship with Falun Dafa began in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite the Tiananmen Square massacre, freedom was on the march around the world, and many believed that China was loosening its grip on society. At the same time, the country experienced a boom in the practice of qigong, or traditional Chinese meditation and exercises. Beijing tolerated the qigong craze, reasoning that it would improve public health and lessen the strain on its healthcare system. 

As the 1990s went on, one strain of qigong came to exceed the others in popularity: Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong. For a time, the practice had the official endorsement of the Party, and reached tens of millions of followers at its peak—typically estimated between 70 and 100 million.

What distinguished Falun Dafa from other forms of Chinese physical activity allowed by the communists was its spiritual dimension. Its founder, Li Hongzhi, urged followers to adopt a handful of ethical principles: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Another rule of the movement was not to take money or any other profit from teaching. Though Chinese officials would later describe the movement as a dangerous cult controlled by Li, Jekielek stressed the apolitical and individual nature of its practice; there was never any “membership list” or formal organization, only a growing group of practitioners.

Falun Dafa spread like wildfire, and it grew to alarm the Chinese Communist Party. It is not difficult to see why. Falun Dafa’s focus on spirituality amounted to a direct contradiction to Marxism’s fundamentally materialist ideology. Even the principle of not taking money befuddled Beijing; without capital, there is no leverage for redistribution and state control over the “producer” of the good. Most damningly, because Falun Dafa was so strongly anchored in traditional, pre-revolution Chinese culture, it could be interpreted as a rejection of the doctrines of communism. For a Party long accustomed to total control over society, any movement that could challenge its rule, no matter how benign, could not be permitted to exist. As Jekielek explains:

“In a totalitarian society like communist China, which, historically speaking, is a relatively new and still poorly understood political innovation, the state controls everything. Anything that even suggests independence from state authority is either crushed or co-opted. Such a society can’t function any other way. There is no space for a civil society because its very existence would threaten the Party’s absolute control.”

Mass Murder and Organ Harvesting

In 1999, the persecutions began. The Communist Party established a bureau dedicated to fighting and disintegrating Falun Dafa. This bureau—known as the 610 Office, or “Liu Yao Ling,” named after its June 10 creation date—was created outside of Chinese legislative channels and explicitly empowered to conduct extrajudicial activity. Party officials justified the bureau’s sweeping powers by citing the nature of the threat; by this time, Falun Dafa practitioners numbered in the tens of millions, and included members of the administration and the military.

During the early days of the anti-Falun Dafa campaign, the government tried to “re-educate” its practitioners, encouraging them to abandon the faith. When that failed, it escalated its crackdown—rounding up thousands of adherents and pressing them into labor camps without trial or legal recourse. According to numerous credible sources, the 610 Office was responsible for a wide range of violent actions that were nominally illegal even under the Chinese legal system: extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual assault, and the illegal confiscation of property.

According to Chinese law and official practice, it is permitted to use the organs of executed prisoners for transplants. This practice had never been used at scale before, but the crackdown on Falun Dafa adherents created the ideal conditions. Jekielik describes the beginnings of large-scale organ harvesting as the precise moment when the needs of the system, state corruption, and market demand converged in the early 2000s. Every “need” of the moment could be met through organ harvesting: enemies of the system would disappear, supply of organs would grow, China’s overburdened healthcare system would improve, and foreign medical tourists would bring an influx of cash. Most disturbingly, a donor’s organs must be harvested shortly after death and cannot be stored for long periods of time: this means that in order for a recipient to benefit from them, the donor must be executed within hours of the transplant. This state of affairs means that Chinese political prisoners are kept alive until a recipient for their organs is ready to receive the transplant, then immediately executed and harvested—“killed to order,” as Jekielek puts it.

The true number of Falun Dafa practitioners murdered for their organs will likely never be known. Estimates vary in the hundreds of thousands; Jekielek speculates a higher-end figure of one million. Nor, in spite of the Party’s loud protestations, has the practice come to an end. As Falun Dafa practitioners have gone further underground and become more difficult for the authorities to find, Beijing has shifted gears, using the practice against other troublesome ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and, in more recent years, Uyghurs.

The West Benefits from China’s Human Rights Abuses—by Design

One might assume that the Western world would react to these horrors with vicious condemnation, international sanctions, and extreme diplomatic pressure. Indeed, many in the West have called for precisely these steps. Yet despite the compelling evidence, much of the Western world reacted with studied ignorance—and, in some cases, compliance.

The historical record is clear that Beijing’s practice of organ harvesting benefited immensely from an influx of “organ tourists” from abroad, taking advantage of the abundant supply and low cost of spare organs in China and not questioning where they came from. As of 2026, only two countries in the world have taken steps to limit organ tourism: Israel has banned insurance reimbursement for transplants performed abroad in suspicious circumstances, and the United States has introduced legislation and sanctions targeting forced organ harvesting.

What is particularly interesting is how Jekielek links forced organ harvesting to the Chinese doctrine of “unrestricted warfare.” According to this doctrine, the Party should achieve absolute dominance by all means military and non-military, including economic, legal, and psychological. In this schema, organ harvesting amounts to a non-military tactic: it both ingratiates China to the West as a healthcare supplier and erodes the West’s confidence in its own principles.

“The CCP’s strategy of ‘wooing the barbarians,’ of drawing Western elites into cooperation and complicity, was no accident,” Jekielek writes. “Nor was it some kind of diplomatic improvisation. It was deliberate, methodical, and central to a broader campaign designed to weaken the West from within: to erode its moral confidence, corrupt its institutions, and make its leaders unwilling or unable to confront the truth of what China has become.”

Most Americans would recoil at the thought of accepting organs from murdered Chinese political prisoners. Yet there are subtler, more insidious ways that they benefit from China’s disdain for human rights. They browse TikTok, shop on Temu, watch movies from Hollywood studios catering to Chinese censors, and buy clothes from Nike and Gap—both of which were implicated in forced labor use in Xinjiang, along with dozens of others of major Western companies. If they were given a simple, binary choice between the continued flow of cheap goods and better human rights halfway around the world, which would they choose?

When everyone is complicit—when Westerners themselves benefit from China’s practices—no one is to blame.

Killed to Order is an important study of how today’s China is built on some of the worst crimes of our time. It explains how communism works, and explains that the West cannot change the world simply by attempting to export its lifestyle and assuming the best. It also shows how deeply the Chinese Communist Party has penetrated the United States, waging a constant war—even if we do not fully recognize it.

The question is no longer what we know. Like Felix Frankfurter and Jan Karski, are we willing to believe, and act in time?

About the Author: Filip Styczynski

Filip Styczynski is a correspondent-at-large for the Center for Intermarium Studies at the Institute of World Politics. He is the co-founder of TVP World, where he served as editor-in-chief, launching the region’s pioneering English-language media channel in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). His work has been featured in leading outlets like Israel Hayom, The Kyiv Post, and The Daily Signal, among others. His contributions to journalism and security discourse earned him the Polish Journalist Association’s Special Award. He also received Ukraine’s Stratcom Certificate of Appreciation for countering Russian propaganda. Filip co-founded the All Brothers Foundation, supporting Christian communities in Muslim-majority countries. His career bridges journalism, national security, and faith-driven advocacy, fostering dialogue across cultures and borders. Follow him on X:@FilipStyczynski.