In his new, bestselling book, “Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary,” Jan Jekielek, a senior editor at The Epoch Times, reports on China’s state-sanctioned harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience while making a larger argument about the inhumane nature of its communist regime. In this excerpt from the book, Jekielek details how the party’s collectivist ethos – “the greatest good for the greatest number” – allows it to commit atrocities, including taking organs, from individuals it deems a threat to the whole. (Read another excerpt here.)
By Jan Jekielek
The healthcare system in China is perhaps the purest, most direct reflection of the Party’s ultimate goal: self-preservation. It is a literal life-extension industry for the Party elite.
There are actually two systems in China—one for the elites, and another for everyone else. The elite system is excellent. The public system is rudimentary, underfunded, and riddled with corruption, with much of the funding that moves through bureaucratic channels siphoned off by officials at various levels before it ever reaches patients.
China’s two healthcare systems are not merely the byproduct of a corrupt organization or a tale of haves and have-nots. It has been engineered, like all systems in China, by the CCP. It is part and parcel of the Party’s approach to healthcare for the general population, which they view through the lens of utilitarian bioethics, an ideology that by nature devalues individual life.
Traditional medical ethics, rooted in the Hippocratic principle of “do no harm,” is patient-centered. Its purpose is to help the person in front of the physician, using whatever tools and knowledge are available. Medicine, in that sense, is an art grounded in compassion and individual responsibility.
Utilitarian bioethics turns that on its head. It views health in terms of statistical outcomes and population-level goals. The guiding idea is “the greatest good for the greatest number” (sometimes described as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”), with the caveat that the Party always comes first because without the Party, there is no state. If improving the overall picture means sacrificing a few, the sacrifice is justified. Many might call that reasonable—after all, every policy carries some cost—but the consequences of utilitarian bioethics are profound.
The difference lies in what is valued. Under a utilitarian model, human beings become variables in an equation. The second-order effects—the erosion of empathy, the normalization of sacrifice— are immense but largely invisible.
The COVID-19 years revealed the consequences of this mind set with brutal clarity. In China, the government’s draconian lockdowns—people welded into their homes, food passed through metal slots—were extreme expressions of utilitarian bioethics. The policy was irrational, but it made sense within the CCP’s worldview: a top-down system obsessed with control and indifferent to human suffering in pursuit of its “zero COVID” objective. The regime had both the ideology and the mechanisms to enforce it.
That is utilitarian bioethics in its purest form: sacrificing individual welfare for a population-level target, implemented by a state willing to bear, or impose, the human cost. The personal element disappears. Everything becomes transactional, or instrumentalized.
The problem with “the greatest good for the greatest number” is that someone must decide where the line of acceptable harm lies. In a totalitarian system, that line barely exists. As long as the population does not rebel, almost any level of suffering can be justified.
The Hippocratic model, by contrast, preserves individual agency. It demands that practitioners engage creatively and compassionately with the person before them, rather than treating patients as data points on a bell curve. It represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about human life.
In a communist society, the utilitarian model reigns supreme, in essence, by definition. It is the moral logic behind the infamous quip often attributed to Stalin: “In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.” The idea is not unique to China, and, indeed, we are already seeing these ideas creep into the mainstream in far freer societies. But China has taken it much further, pushing utilitarian bioethics to its extreme conclusion.
The communist model runs on systemic graft. The Party sets strategic objectives, which are implemented in different ways across society. Success is measured not by ethics or outcomes but by how effectively those objectives are fulfilled. Profit, power, self-enrichment are tolerated, even encouraged, so long as they serve the Party’s broader goals. There is no rule of law in the conventional sense; there is only compliance with Party directives. Anything is permissible.
The dangers of this overly controlled, engineered approach to how people should live become abundantly clear when we take a broader look at how the CCP has implemented it. The one-child policy is a prime example.
The precise reasoning behind the policy is unclear—perhaps they read Paul Erlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb and decided to believe it. The idea that there are too many people on the planet and humanity is in danger of destroying itself captured the imaginations of many people in the middle of the twentieth century. Some still believe it today, even though it has led to some of the worst outcomes imaginable.
Regardless of its internal logic at the time, China believed that the growth of the population needed to be slowed, and in 1979, the Party instituted the one-child policy to do it. The policy was in place until 2015.
There were other advantages—from the Party’s perspective. Traditionally, Chinese families are large; it’s a deeply family oriented culture. The family is the core structure where people find comfort, loyalty, and support. A strong family unit creates natural independence because people prioritize family over the Party. Understanding the inherent threat posed by a society with a strong family structure, the Party sought to undo it.
Families were limited to a single child, and local governments were given quotas to enforce the rule. If families in a district exceeded the limit, the local officials responsible could lose privileges, or see their share of graft reduced. There were always incentives to ensure compliance.
The consequences were devastating. First, birth rates fell sharply. Second, abortion was promoted as a social good. Third, and most horrific, the state carried out forced abortions on a massive scale. There were countless cases of women being coerced or physically forced to terminate pregnancies. Selective abortions were also common, as families tended to prefer sons over daughters.
The result was a profound gender imbalance—millions more men than women—and a shortage of young people needed to sustain the aging population. Now China faces a vast demographic hole: too few young people to care for the old, and a social system unable to support its own weight. Beginning in 2016, to counter the effects of the one-child policy, the Chinese government replaced it with a two-child policy. When it became clear that the change had little effect, the state expanded the limit again in 2021 to a three-child policy, essentially raising the ceiling every five years as demographic pressures worsened. These shifts reflected the Party’s growing alarm over shrinking workforce numbers, low fertility, and the long-term economic strain of an imbalanced population structure. In the end, this may prove to be one of the greatest threats to the Party’s long-term stability.
There is no clear solution.
You could argue that the CCP’s One-Child Policy wasn’t entirely about population control—it was a deliberate, decades long war on the traditional Chinese family, which is the most basic traditional unit of all human societies. By criminalizing brothers and sisters, by sending goon squads to drag pregnant mothers for forced abortions and sterilizations, by turning grandparents, neighbors, even husbands against wives through terror and bounties, the Party systematically shattered the multi-generational family that had been China’s core moral and social unit for millennia. Filial piety? Obliterated. Family loyalty? Replaced with loyalty to the Party alone. The goal was crystal clear: atomize society, leave every individual isolated, dependent, and obedient only to the state.
The CCP doesn’t see its citizens as individuals with inherent dignity, but rather as raw material. Xi Jinping has compared China’s human talent to “oil in the ground” that must be drilled, refined, and burned for national power. That same logic runs the vast slave-labor empire: laogai (camps convicted criminals doing forced labor), “re-education through labor” camps (abolished in 2013, but arguably just moved into different parts of the system), Xinjiang factories where Uyghurs and dissidents are worked liter ally to death making your Christmas lights, personal protective equipment (PPE), solar panels, everything. When a worker collapses, the body is discarded.
Human life, in such a monstrous system, is just another resource to be used, exhausted, and discarded.
Excerpt courtesy of Skyhorse Publishing.
