Foreign Policy > Communist China

Immortality via Atrocities

Want to live forever? The Chinese government has a way.

Richard Kirk | March 29, 2026

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were chatting while strolling toward a military parade at Tiananmen Square in September of 2025 when a microphone picked up their comments about living 150 years or longer.  In Communist China, that possibility isn’t just wishful thinking, as Jan Jekielek’s book, Killed to Order, reveals.  The regime clearly has a supply of fresh body parts in prison storage available when needed for elite party members as well as for transplant tourists willing to pay handsomely for an anonymous victim’s liver, kidney, or heart.  The public obituary of an 87-year-old communist official in which he boasts that “many of his components are not his anymore” hints at that fact.  

A more chilling statement comes from the ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon in northwest China.  She asserts that three to four thousand political prisoners were killed for their organs at the hospital where she and her husband worked.  The husband estimated that he removed corneas from around two thousand live prisoners.  In another specific case reliably related to Jekielek, a “Chinese military surgeon killed eight prisoners of conscience to supply one foreign patient with a matching kidney.”

The fate of those subjected to forced organ removals is almost always death and immediate cremation, but one person, Cheng Pei Ming, survived an initial surgery and later told his story.  Cheng was arrested as a Falun Gong member for protesting the group’s persecution.  Tortured in prison, he survived an initial forced surgery.  Prior to what would doubtless have been a second surgery and death, he escaped and eventually made his way to the U.S. via Thailand.  In the States, he discovered that part of his liver and lung had been removed in a procedure that wasn’t health-based.  

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