For years, the Chinese Communist Party has faced relentless accusations of one of humanity’s most abhorrent crimes: systematically murdering prisoners of conscience—individuals jailed solely for their beliefs—to harvest organs for profit within a transnational transplant industry.
The powerful 2024 documentary State Organs, directed by award-winning filmmaker Raymond Zhang, illuminates this horror. It follows two Chinese families over two decades as they desperately seek loved ones who vanished after detention. Their harrowing journey reveals what appears to be an extensive state-sponsored forced organ harvesting operation, with Falun Gong practitioners as primary targets.
Falun Gong, a peaceful spiritual practice grounded in meditation and principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, gained widespread popularity across China in the 1990s. This growth deeply alarmed then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who initiated a brutal campaign against it in 1999. The film details how this persecution escalated into disappearances, torture, imprisonment, and live organ extraction to fuel a lucrative transplant network. Through raw family testimonies, eyewitness accounts—including from a military doctor—and mounting evidence, State Organs paints a damning picture of crimes against humanity that persist today.
This reality has triggered immediate consequences. Following the documentary’s October 2024 release in Taiwan, authorities intercepted at least 28 bomb threats targeting theaters, lawmakers, and events, with demands for screenings to cease. Similar hoax threats disrupted screenings in Australia and other regions. The Chinese Communist Party and its proxies remain determined to suppress any narrative exposing their brutality.
The documentary’s release coincided with the launch of Jan Jekielek’s new book Killed to Order, which investigates China’s organ trade and its devastating impact on human rights, medical ethics, and global security. As Canada’s government explores renewed diplomatic and economic ties with Beijing—including discussions of a “new type of strategic partnership”—this development forces a critical reckoning: Are nations prepared to deepen relations with a regime accused of industrialized murder for organs? Democratic societies cannot continue treating human rights as optional when negotiating trade agreements. The truth is emerging, regardless of the threats deployed by those who seek to bury it.
Scarlett Grace is a Canadian journalist and musician from Peterborough, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Trent University and has spent over a decade performing live and releasing original music. In 2022, her involvement in Canada’s freedom movement marked a turning point in her career and public voice. She later joined Rebel News as an anti-discrimination journalist, reporting extensively on rising antisemitism in Canada and the Iranian uprising.
