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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
438: Jan Jekielek—The Terrible Truth About China
01:29:21
Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of “.” He has extensively covered the issue of forced organ harvesting in China, particularly concerning Falun Gong practitioners. It is estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 organs annually...
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- [00:00]
Janya Kellick
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Rowe
Hey, guys, it's Mike Rowe. This is the way I heard it. My guest today is Janya Kellick. Chuck, did I get it right? Yeah, you said it exactly right. That's the way he says it. Full disclosure, this is the second time I'm doing this, and as you know, I hate to do anything two times, but as a rule, I hate to mispronounce my guest name. And likewise, you hate when I correct you. I do hate that a lot. So we did cut that out. You know what? There's something here to hate for everyone except for Jan, who is a terrific guy. He works for the Epoch Times. Sure, let's go with Epoch. Were you like Epoch? I think what he said was Epoch. Yeah, Epoch or. Oh, God, here we go again. Whatever it is, I called him the Epoch Times for like five years. That's what their advertising says. I believe so. I think it does too. Yeah, well, look, we don't spend a lot of time talking about pronunciations in this episode, but we do spend some because the language matters an awful lot. And the Epoch Times interviewed me years ago, and I met Jan, who does a terrific series called American Thought Leaders.
- [01:04]
Janya Kellick
Yes.
- [01:05]
Mike Rowe
And he's also the senior editor over there at the Epoch or the Epoch or the Epoch Times. I've been wanting to have him on here for a while because I didn't really give these guys the credit I think they deserved for creating a really fantastic journalistic enterprise. They really have put their money where their mouth is and there's not a ton of money to go around. It's a subscription based model. But this newspaper, unlike the Journal or the New York Times or really any other newspaper I can think of, began like 20 years ago in Georgia and it was published entirely in Chinese. In Chinese for an American. Chinese audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, well, some of you are old enough to remember Tiananmen Square and the. And the full on gong and the persecution that happened to something like 70 to 100 million. This conversation is going to blow you away. It's called the Terrible Truth about China because there are many terrible truths. But how familiar, Chuck, were you with this one? Not as much as I. I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't as. As aware, although I was aware of the organ harvesting, but only through Jan's work. Yeah, well, spoiler alert. That's what's been in front of me now for the last couple of months. The more I've read about this, the more it's just become something I can't not look at. Yeah, it's 60 to 100,000 human organs a year are being taken from dissidents, from living people, prisoners, people who have been put in prison, really, because they're political enemies of the state. Right. Anyway, we're talking about hearts and livers and kidneys and lungs and all sorts of things. And it's a $9 billion business, and it's happening right in front of our noses. And no one except the Chinese government is really denying it. It's just one more thing we don't quite know what to do with. And it just seems like now, as we're looking at these tariffs and trying to figure out how to talk about the economy and how to talk about the future and how to talk about our reliance and our dependence on countries that don't share our values, it just seems like a good time to maybe push this out in the sunlight a bit. Yeah. He has a lot to say about very important things. It's going to make you look at China a lot differently. And if you're not aware already, it did me. Let me say a thing that I hate to say, not because I don't believe it, but because I just hate the fact that I have to say it. The Chinese are a wonderful people. The Chinese culture is an amazing culture. I'm talking about the Chinese government. Yes. I'm talking about the Communists. I'm talking about the fact that we have, for a long list of, well, people will say complicated reasons, but actually they're not complicated. They're economic reasons. We're in business right now with people that I don't think we want to be in business with, and I think most Americans would agree with. It's just that things get a little wobbly when our individual 401ks and the cost of our sweatshirts and the cost of everything hits us right smack between the eyes. So you got some situational ethics to contend with as we dig in with Jan Yekelik in an episode called the Terrible Truth About China. Right after this. Dumb. Every time I turn around, it seems like the guys at Pure Talk are doing that. Makes me feel really good about switching from Verizon. Right now, for instance, they're on a mission to give an allegiance flag that's the highest quality American flag there is and one of the few that are still made in America to a thousand US Veterans in time for the patriotic holidays. I'm talking about Flag Day and National PTSD Awareness Day toward the end of June. Independence Day, of course, coming up. Just switch your cell phone service to PureTalk this month. And a portion of every sale will go to provide these high quality flags to 1,000 deserving veterans. I think it's a great initiative. PureTalk plans start at just 25 bucks a month. You get unlimited talk, text, plenty of data, which means you can start enjoying America's most dependable 5G network while cutting your cell phone bill in half. That's not an exaggeration. The average family is saving over $1,000 a year with PureTalk. Go to PureTalk.com ro support our vets and switch to America's wireless company, a company that actually stands for something. Pure talk.
- [05:46]
Janya Kellick
My talk, your talk, more talk.
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Mike Rowe
Pure Talk. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm in your debt. I've got many questions. I'm tempted to dive right, right into this tariff thing, but before I do that, congratulations on. What is it? Thought leaders.
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Janya Kellick
Yeah. American thought leaders made a show six years ago and people liked it.
- [06:26]
Mike Rowe
It's so good. And I'm not saying that because I've been on it twice. I thought I did pretty well when I was on, but people loved it. And it's such an interesting mix of guests. And your perspective, I think, is. I mean, it must be fun to watch a thing grow the way this has.
- [06:40]
Janya Kellick
Well, for me it's been, frankly, six years of educating myself about all sorts of things I didn't really know about, trying to figure out the madness of our world because these last years have been some of the most eventful, it seems, in quite some time.
- [06:58]
Mike Rowe
I think we're living in the most, certainly the most interesting time in my life. It's not for me to say about the whole, you know, last generation or two, but I just can't imagine how more interesting things can get.
- [07:11]
Janya Kellick
I think what happens over the next few years is for all the marbles. So I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think China, and I'm biased, of course, because this has been my focus for the last 25 years. I think China's at the center of it with the Communist Party at its helm.
- [07:27]
Mike Rowe
Well, I think you're right. I think a lot of people in this country are in various stages of, of denial, or maybe it's the five stages of grief, I don't know. But to be so reliant on a country that is so fundamentally, at least from the policy side, at odds with so many of our tenants. I feel like America has really been the frog in the pot of boiling water and it's starting to bubble over the sides Right now. But before we get to all of that, Epoch, Epic. What's the correct way to pronounce your.
- [08:05]
Janya Kellick
It took me a great many years to figure out how to simply explain the answer. But, well, so here's. Here's what I usually say to people, okay? You know, we're obviously for freedom of speech at Epoch, right? And we're. We're for freedom of belief, for freedom of conscience. I mean, this is a core, core value. In fact, we're also for freedom of pronunciation.
- [08:29]
Mike Rowe
Because even when I was on the front page of your publication, I was handing out copies to people saying, check it out. I'm in the Epoch Times. Which, of course, you know, was wrong until I heard other people further up the food chain than me pronounce it the same way. And I thought, well, maybe I'm right. Maybe you guys just spelled it wrong.
- [08:48]
Janya Kellick
Here's the weird thing, okay? The correct way to pronounce it in American English is epoch. But nobody does that. No one even knows that's the case. One of our editors once explained this to me. And around the world, a lot of Canadian like me, we say epoch. But it's also phonetic. So you think epoch. You know what it's spelled like, you know how to get to the website. But if you say epic, that's not the website I want to be sending people to. But it's perfectly fine to use that, too.
- [09:15]
Mike Rowe
Well, look. And I guess I should officially start with an apology of sorts, because I didn't. Well, I didn't really understand the level of subversion, really, that you guys embraced. I knew a little bit about Fu Long Gong from what I had read. I knew it was a big persecuted group, but I had no idea. You're the senior editor over there, correct? Right. And so this whole thing has grown into a really sizable organ. But it started by some Chinese Americans who were publishing the Truth in Chinese in Georgia, if I recall.
- [09:57]
Janya Kellick
That's right, in Atlanta. So, I mean, it's kind of an incredible story because it is, you know, I know how much you love the American dream, Mike, and this is the American dream at work. You know, you have people that a number of whom had been involved in the student movement in 1989. Right. And you know, what happened? Some people watching might not even happen, so I'll just mention it. Right.
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Mike Rowe
Tiananmen Square was talking about.
- [10:18]
Janya Kellick
Exactly. There was a giant movement for democracy of students all across the country, all across China and many, many cities. And then the regime came in and decided to crush it. And they made A point. They made an example of the place where it was centered, where the kind of leadership of the movement was. And there was a massacre. They sent in the military to do it. And we don't know how many people died. The number that is on my mind is about 5000 were killed by the PLA. What happened afterwards was a bunch of things in a good way and a bunch of things in a terrible way. The west said, well, that wasn't too good, but we're not really going to hold you to account in any way. Communist China. A good thing that happened is some of these students that were in the movement managed to get scholarships to Georgia Tech. In this case, we're talking about Atlanta, Georgia here. They ended up there and they found freedom and just never went back, which is what a lot of people did that were a little more quietly in the movement or weren't. The authorities weren't aware of them. And when the Chinese regime started persecuting the Falun Gong, which was in 1999, this is now 10 years later, these people thought to themselves, hey, we're in a free country. We have the First Amendment, we can do something. We can actually tell this story, which we weren't able to tell effectively last time, that all this happened because communist regimes always pick an enemy. It's just how it works. You have to blame all the ills of society, which you're creating, mostly on someone else. Right. Because it obviously can't be the Communist Party that's responsible.
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Mike Rowe
No.
- [11:55]
Janya Kellick
So, so 1999, Falun Gong becomes the group that's, that's targeted. And of course, to justify this, there's always a massive media campaign, or you could call it propaganda, you know, state media, all media in China are controlled. And you take a group of, you know, people who were. It was growing really, really fast in the 90s, right up until I think we. The government estimate was 70 to 100 million people by the end of the 90s.
- [12:24]
Mike Rowe
So that's the first thing I'm apologizing for. Right. When I think of Falun Gong, I don't know, bigger than heaven's gate and maybe not as crazy, but some culty kind of thing that just existed somewhere over there in the shadows. You're talking about 100 million people. This is massive. And it's a. I mean, it's not a cult, but it is certainly a concentration of like minded people who seem to. I mean, the more I read, the more embarrassed I was, because it feels like truth, justice in the American way.
- [12:58]
Janya Kellick
Well, perhaps you're alluding to truthfulness, compassion and forbearance being the core principles. Right. And the Falun Gong practitioners take those very seriously. It's kind of the centerpiece of the practice, at least as I understand it. But, you know, hate, propaganda, slander is very effective, especially when it's dished out on a, you know, kind of all country, whole of government scale, like whole of propaganda organ scale. And that's what happened. So one of the other things, one of the reasons why Falun Gong became so popular, I think, is that it had these health benefits, right?
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Mike Rowe
Yeah. There was like, almost like a Tai Chi component.
- [13:37]
Janya Kellick
Correct. So there's these exercises that you do. Really, the whole thing is in traditional methods. You can think of it like a Chinese yoga. It's a yoga traditionally, or qigong traditionally, which is what Chinese is called. It actually means energy practice. It's never just physical exercise. It's traditionally. It's always the three parts. Mind, body, and spirit. You're cultivating yourself, you're cultivating your body, you're cultivating your mind and your spirit all at once. So really, when you're a fellow Kong practitioner, you're practicing those principles, and that manifests in your body as well. And there's these exercises that kind of support you in doing that. At least that's how I understand it.
- [14:14]
Mike Rowe
So at some point, this practice really comes to the attention of the Chinese government. And for whatever reason they see. Is it the tenants that they were so opposed to, or just the critical mass of people, the number of people who were practicing, that freaked them out?
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Janya Kellick
You're hitting on something really important. I hadn't really thought about the tenants themselves being responsible. I mean, Communist parties are very jealous. You could say they don't like anything that's not directly under their control. And Falun Gong is very unusual actually, as a system. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why it's kind of misunderstood in the West. It doesn't. There's a lot of teachings written by a man named Li Hongzhi, who's the teacher or the master. Some people don't like that term. But you can think of it in the Eastern sense. Right? There's a lot of teachings, but there aren't a lot of rules. There aren't a lot of things that you absolutely have to do. Right. You know, one of the things would be, for example, that you're not allowed to enrich yourself by sharing it with people. Right. That would be a rule. Another one is sharing the practice with people. Correct. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or yeah. Or in any way, frankly, you know, associated with it. That would be one of the rules. Another of the rules would be that there's no hierarchy. You have an internal level which you're raising as you cultivate, as you do this practice. But there's no black belt or anything like that. There's no. And there's no kind of priest or some kind of person like this. No, you actually have to find your own way through the teachings. And that's the way. That would be another rule at least. You know, again, these are, these are. This is Jan's version. Right. But another rule would be, let's say you're a great Falun Gong practitioner. You practice truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. Really well. Right. I can't emulate you. I would need to understand the teachings and find my own way to live those principles. Right. So you. So it's very self directed. Right. In a lot of ways I think it actually promotes, you know, individual agency. And that is something the communists do not like what the persecution look like.
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Mike Rowe
Once it became a thing.
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Janya Kellick
So one of the reasons that we know it happened was that the dictator at the time, his name was Jiang Zemin, he was very jealous of Lee Hongsha. He, you know, basically here was someone, a man who had the genuine love of the people. It changed a lot of people's lives a lot. There were a lot of these health benefits that I was mentioning. So people were getting healthy. There was even awards, some were even getting awards, you know, from their local governments for, for helping do things. So yeah, like, basically it was this emergent movement that grew basically right from the ground up. Another rule, I just, I'm kind of deviating a little bit from your question would be that there's no kind of official roster. You're a practitioner because you choose to be, because you say you are, because you live well, not entirely because you're really trying to live it that way. It's an internal. Like I could say I am, but if I'm not really living the teachings, I'm not one.
- [17:12]
Mike Rowe
I just find this so interesting because it's like, like you could look at the Boy Scouts, you could look at the Kiwanis Club, the jcs, you could look at, you know, these civic organizations and if you sprinkle in a little physicality and then, you know, lean into whatever their tenants happen to be and then suddenly it grew. Like in this country, if you had. I don't know what the relative corollary would be, but tens of millions of people all doing the same thing.
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Janya Kellick
Right.
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Mike Rowe
So with the persecution, do they come over here en masse? Did they come over here at the same time as the Tiananmen Square uprising? Were those two things sort of conflated or juxtaposed?
- [17:47]
Janya Kellick
No. So this is. We've got about a 10 period things in the 90s in China. The healthcare system kind of really crumbled. And at the same time, there was a little bit of internal opening up after the Tiananmen Square massacre. So people started going back to these old methods. Qigong was just a name. It just means energy practice that, you know, all these things were called, basically had very religious sounding names. So you didn't want to use that. Yeah, because communists don't like that. So anyway, they named them different things and they started doing them on mass. And Falun Gong was just by far the most popular, the most effective arguably, and so forth. And so a combination of the government saying, hey, this is bigger than the Communist Party. Right. I think there were 60 million Communist Party members at the time. Right. This was bigger than the Communist Party on one hand, grassroots. So it's not sitting underneath a lid. And basically kind of the lid of the party. And at the same time, there's this kind of jealousy that the dictator knows he can never. He has his iron fist, he can rule, but he'll never have the love of the people like this man does. And so the combination of that. That's how I always viewed it. Okay. That's what caused this. What caused it? I mean, basically he outlawed it and he imagined, and we know this through documentation, that he thought he could eradicate the group. And he didn't mean kill everybody, it just meant crush it. Right. You know, basically re educate the people, get them to renounce it. That was the purpose, I think initially turned out that people don't re educate easily that do this practice because of this internal agency that's grown because of the benefits they got from it. They wouldn't. That's when unwritten rules started being laid down into the. Remember, they put millions of people into the prison and labor camp system. This is a massive thing across the entire country now. The rule becomes unwritten. Unfortunately, we just know again from testimony, all Falun Gong deaths in these places will be ruled suicides. So the real thing was you can work on these people whatever way to break them. And they tried really hard. That's when this thing really went bad. And I think the organ harvesting piece is kind of the most pernicious in communist societies. This is difficult for people to understand. But if you end up on the enemy of state side of things, or you're not sort of sanctioned by the regime, or the regime doesn't kind of agree to what you're doing, you are not really human anymore. It's arguably. I don't even know if anybody is, but you can be basically dealt with in whatever way, in whatever means. It's a twisted, twisted way of thinking. So someone. And I have a theory who this is, but I'm not gonna. I don't have evidence of this part. Said, hey, look, we're just growing our organ industry. We're just. We've just started it. We've been using these death row prisoners to do this. Now we have millions of people in the system. This is perfect. We can. We can do whatever we want now. And they're healthy. And on top of that, where they're healthy. Early 2000s.
- [20:46]
Mike Rowe
Okay, so what we know about organ transplants, at least. What I know is that you can't. You need a living person who's basically brain dead, correct? Right.
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Janya Kellick
In most cases, corneas would be the exception, but yes.
- [21:00]
Mike Rowe
Okay, but you can't take a heart from a cadaver or a liver or a spleen or whatever, a kidney. So you've got millions of people, many Falun Gong imprisoned. And the reason I reached out to you was I read somewhere that there was just a. And just one of the most baffling coincidences. How come there's so many hospitals built right next to prisons in China?
- [21:27]
Janya Kellick
Yeah, well, it's crazy. I mean, listen, when I was doing human rights work for a couple of years, I represented the International Society for Human Rights in Poland. This was during the time of the Beijing Olympics. We actually made a map where we showed all the Olympic venues and then the forced labor camps and re education camps that were right beside those venues. Unbeknownst to the world. Unbeknownst to the world. We didn't get a lot of play with that, unfortunately. I was thinking it would be like. It would be the most interesting thing for people. The suggestion was, go, go knock on the door there and find out what they do at this place. See what they tell you. You know, at the very least, you could do that. Right? But the whole thing was just totally nuts.
- [22:12]
Mike Rowe
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- [24:19]
Janya Kellick
That's right. There's been quite a large body of evidence that's been developed about this and I'll tell people right away. To some of you, it's going to sound crazy and unbelievable and it is unbelievable, in fact. So that's a fair reaction. Chinatribunal.org is the repository of a year long tribunal that assessed all the available evidence a few years back. And it's pretty compelling and pretty damning. But I'll give you kind of a thumbnail, a bit of a picture, okay? The situation you just described, Mike. Jakob Levy, the head of the Israeli Transplant association at the time, he had a patient. They have socialized medicine, they pay for people to get necessary work done outside of the country. Right. Health related. So he said, look, I'm waiting for a heart and I'm going to go. And they've scheduled it for me. And Dr. Jakob basically said, that's impossible. There's no ethical way that could be done because as you said, you can't transplant from a cadaver. But the guy goes, gets the heart, comes back and here I am. Right. And that's when Jakob realized this is real, there's something terrible is happening. And Israel was, I think, the first country to enact legislation that in some way countered this terrible situation by saying we're not going to pay. There's a bunch of states now that are enacting legislation like that, but it's really only now. And we're talking about 2006, 2007, something like this right now. But we know that this has been happening since the early 2000s. The growth of this industry has been basically kind of almost exponential growth has been since the early 2000s.
- [25:58]
Mike Rowe
What am I looking at there? The China Tribunal.
- [26:01]
Janya Kellick
That's right. So Sir Jeffrey Nice, who was the prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic back in the day, he was asked to convene a people's tribunal. What that is is basically they went and found all the experts, anybody related to this issue and tried to establish is this real? And for that, because this is the question everybody is asking themselves as they're watching this show. Unless they already know. Right. How could this be a thing? How could this be real? And by the way, you asked me about the scale, Mike. The scale. The best estimates that we have are still. And these came from Ethan Gutman, who wrote an amazing book called the Slaughter. One of the best journalists that have in depth reporters on this issue over the years, about 60 to 100,000 a year transplants from no ethically provided donor. Okay, a year. That's his estimate.
- [26:57]
Mike Rowe
No, not. Okay. Well, wait a minute. 60,000 organs are being removed, probably from prisoners.
- [27:05]
Janya Kellick
Correct. And there's no credible organ donation. They only instituted a supposed organ registry in 2015. In response to people asking these inconvenient questions, there's a paper in one of, I forget which journal is right now that shows that their growth of that organ registry is a perfect quadratic equation, which means they fudged the data so that to our knowledge, whatever credible organ donor in situation there is, it's tiny, it does not account for even a small portion of the annual organs being transplanted.
- [27:41]
Mike Rowe
And I assume the market is global. This isn't just.
- [27:44]
Janya Kellick
Well, the people come from all over, but it's, you know, as far as we can tell, it's obviously Chinese the most. Then there's Taiwan, that these countries around there, you know, there was actually a South Korean film crew that went in and actually went to some of these hospitals, got some very interesting information. What they tell people is they say it's a death row prisoner because no one really is going to believe that this is entirely ethically sourced. But to assuage people's guilt, they would say, well, it's a death row prisoner. To me, that's not cool. There's no way a death row prisoner is voluntarily surrendering their organs, but that's how they would make you feel better about it. But you know, even the most aggressive estimates of the death penalty in China, it's still 10, you know, orders of magnitude more transplants happening.
- [28:27]
Mike Rowe
I don't even know how to think about this. So, I mean, is there a dollar figure you can put on it? 60 to 100,000 organs times what, 100,000.
- [28:36]
Janya Kellick
It ranges like. We've seen different numbers. On the low end, it was something like 60,000 for kidneys. This is just off the top of my head up until 200,000 for hearts, livers, things like that. The estimate, David Matis, who is one of the, probably the person who understands this issue the best in the world. He's a human rights lawyer from Winnipeg, fellow Canadian, actually was hunting down the last Nazi war criminals in Canada as part of his work as well, human being. His estimate is, I believe it's a $9 billion a year industry.
- [29:12]
Mike Rowe
Yeah, you're just throwing some numbers around that are just so.
- [29:16]
Janya Kellick
It's, it's consequential, it's hard, it's hard to fathom. Right. But why is this so important? Okay, because we're going to talk about other things too. This helps you understand the nature of the government, the people who purport to govern this country, how they operate and what they allow for. Right. My theory, and I, based on my understanding of the regime and so forth, is that even more so than this, that $9 billion a year, that's tell you about the scale, it's not small, but the real reason is that of the 200 odd families that make up the people, the super elite that rule that country, kind of like the, you know, like you could think of it like the Politburg, the mafia. In a way, it functions a lot like the mafia. Right. They have an unlimited source of organs at any time. Imagine how much that is worth to people. Right. That is decent people.
- [30:14]
Mike Rowe
Who become desperate. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine a moneyed person in this country with a sick kid who's on the clock. This person probably spent their whole life with snappy answers to ethical questions. They would never blink. They would never. No, no, of course not. But you get in a situation, you know, desperation plus means equals, let's call it situational ethics. And you're right, that's what would you need to hear as a parent to somehow assuage your guilt. Well, it's a death row prisoner. Well, you know, if not you, somebody else. If not your kid, somebody else is going to get it.
- [30:57]
Janya Kellick
I even had a friend in Poland tell me, you know, I was explaining this whole thing to him and he said, you know, if it was me, I might do it. And I was like, that is extremely honest of you, but you have a really perverted sense of ethics, my friend.
- [31:15]
Mike Rowe
Well, you know, that's. You're both right. Or both of those things are right. You know, I. We're probably going to hopscotch around a little bit because I think what's going on with the tariffs right now, to your point, these things rhyme. And when you look at, you know, the Uyghurs, you know, I've talked to Ennis Freedom, he's been here. I've talked to. When you look at the whole Free Tibet thing, when you look at how righteous so many Americans get when they are confronted with the inescapable truth of what's going on over there, versus this poll I just saw, I think it was a national review. But the percentage of Americans who will turn a blind eye when their own 401ks, when their own businesses, when their own supply chains are revealed to be so inexorably wrapped up with the Chinese, it's like 52% of people affirmatively say what your friend said. In a way they just say, look, all things considered, life is short and I'm an ostrich and I'm putting my head in the sand.
- [32:20]
Janya Kellick
But let's talk about the Uyghurs for a moment. Or Uyghurs, as I once said, uyghur with an Uyghurs right beside me. And she said Uyghur. I said, yes, you're right, but that's not what people. That's not what people understand. No. But to me, Ethan Gottman, right now, I hope I'm allowed to say this, Ethan is working on a follow up book to the Slaughter, which is how this whole industry has now shifted to the Uyghurs Now, I don't have the evidence around that, but everything I know about how the regime operates and how vulnerable. Okay, let me paint a picture for you, okay? Why is. What's his name?
- [33:01]
Mike Rowe
Ethan? The author?
- [33:02]
Janya Kellick
Ethan Gutman.
- [33:03]
Mike Rowe
G U, T, M A n, one.
- [33:04]
Janya Kellick
T, double N. Okay. Why is it so easy to do this organ harvesting from Falun Gong? You pick people up. You're picking them up en masse, okay? They're not telling their names because they would implicate their family members and their family members are going to get picked up, okay? So you have these people that just disappear into the system and you don't know what happened to them. If they get harvested, they just don't. They never come out. Maybe they died because of torture. Maybe. I mean, they did horrible things to them too. That's well documented. But you just don't know. So with the Uyghurs or Uyghurs, I'll try to say it correctly. This is a much smaller population than the Falun Gong in a fairly remote region, very mountainous region, very hard to get to. Ethnically different. And I won't even talk about sort of this Han supremacism that the CCP has been pushing on the nation as well, which makes it easier to victimize people that are different. It's a similar sort of situation, a very vulnerable population in an isolated area. And one of the things that Ethan found, because I remember I was talking about it at the International Religious Freedom Summit a couple of years back, a situation where there's hospitals that were more recently built right around these labor camps there. I think the estimate is something like 2 million people are in the. I forget what the euphemism is for it, but in the basically concentration camp or slaver camp system. So re. Education, here's, here's the key. You don't deal with it. You say to yourself, hey, look, you know, this is something far away from us. It's happening in China. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Let's not think about this. But there's a reason. When the Genocide Convention was signed, okay, there was this whole idea of never again the Holocaust. My father in law is a Holocaust survivor. This is very close to me. The whole point of the Genocide Convention was never again for real. Right? And meant don't do things of this nature, right? The crimes against humanity, genocide, we could, we could argue about the nuance. But when you allow for that to happen, when you say, because this is the one, you know, people, a lot of there's a lot of folks in America these days that are like, America should pull back. Too much adventurism. They want to be a little. We should be a little more inward focused. I think that may be right. However, when it comes to this level of crime, if we don't hold others accountable, what do we hold people accountable on? You know?
- [35:33]
Mike Rowe
Right.
- [35:34]
Janya Kellick
And so by allowing this Falun Gong persecution and then this whole organ harvesting to go, it wouldn't. It's not that hard to investigate it really. There's people. Some people have tried, but at a larger scale. Now we have it moving to another vulnerable group and here we are. Right. And so this is why we can't be entirely focused on ourselves. Right. Especially when it comes to things of this scale.
- [36:01]
Mike Rowe
But what do we do with our standards when the people we're in business with don't comport? This is an extreme example. It seems to me a no brainer. It's like, wait a minute. If we have incontrovertible proof that the Chinese government is behind a scheme to sell 60 to 100,000 organs harvested from living people. This is Michael Crichton.
- [36:26]
Janya Kellick
This is coma. Let me give you the two closest things to a smoking gun. I think they're pretty smoking gun. Okay. That we have. It's very hard because remember, the crime scene is a hospital room cleaned up. There's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation titled Execution by Organ Procurement. They did a literature search of the Chinese transplant literature and they found 71 instances. And this was by no means exhaustive. 71 instances where the dead donor rule was violated. In other words, the Chinese researchers, transplant people, they wrote into their methods that they had killed someone by extracting their organs without realizing it. And the way I interpret this horribly is that it's just become so normalized over there that they just. That people write it in because this is just how it's done. Okay. That's one thing. The second thing, and I never in a million years thought we'd ever see this, someone like this. But there's a survivor. There's a guy, Chang Fei Mei, who's missing part of his liver and part of his lung. And the Chinese regime admits they operated on him. They say they did it to save his life. There's a whole week. I'm not going to go into the nuance of all this. The point is the guy's alive by multiple miracles, as is the case with, you know, the many Holocaust survivors that I've interviewed over the years. And he's missing Part of his liver and part of his lung. The scans show it and it was done there. So how do you get away? The quick answer is by multiple quirks of fate, as is the case with Holocaust. Every Holocaust survivor, including my father in law that I've talked to, they just made certain decisions where if they had made the other decision, it would have been certain death.
- [38:15]
Mike Rowe
Sliding doors.
- [38:15]
Janya Kellick
For whatever reason, they picked this. And in the end they got to the finish line and they made it somehow. This is the same thing with him. He was almost dead at least twice.
- [38:25]
Mike Rowe
Where is he now? Is he out here?
- [38:27]
Janya Kellick
Well, in the US and he's hiding out because there's an effort right now to repatriate him. You know, this Operation Fox Hunt. So the Chinese regime, I mean, we could talk for a very long time about the stuff it does, but among other things, they put bounties on people's heads and they try to get them back into China so they can deal with them. And that's. There's a whole project, Operation Fox Hunt. You can look that up. And there's a young woman named Frances Hui, who is a Hong Kong. A young. I mean, this is actually an amazing. I'm getting a shiver up my side thinking about it. This young woman was a Hong Kong freedom activist, right? As a teenager, basically. And eventually she basically came to the US Especially after this National Security Law was going to come into place because she would have been picked up immediately. She came here and they put a bounty on it. They put a million dollar Hong Kong dollar bounty on her head. And more recently, they're harassing her family.
- [39:20]
Mike Rowe
Her family's there or here.
- [39:21]
Janya Kellick
Her family's there. But this is what has. So, you know, we could talk about Hong Kong. I was there right before the National Security Law came down. Many of the people I interviewed are in prison. Why? Because they were advocating for freedom. So how quickly can a society change from one of the freest societies in the world, economically at least, but also quite free from a basic civil liberties perspective, overnight turns into something a lot closer to Communist China.
- [39:52]
Mike Rowe
In all your investigative work, all the interviews, all the projects that you've been involved in over the years, where does this rank in terms of Holy crap, America? If I could grab you by your metaphorical lapel and shake you right, this is the thing I want you to pay attention to. Where's it rank? Dumb? We've all heard the pop culture definition of insanity, right? The business of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Like the Business, for instance, of hiring. For decades, companies large and small have been advertising for talent in pretty much the same way, with the expectation that this time it'll work. But it doesn't. And still many of these same companies keep doing this same insane thing over and over. Instead of posting a job for free@ziprecruiter.com ZipRecruiter really is a smarter way to hire. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter.com ro get a quality candidate within the first day. I would call that effective. Insanely effective, I dare say. Likewise, you can use ZipRecruiter's pre written invite to apply message to personally reach out to your favorite candidates and encourage them to apply sooner. That gives you a leg up on the competition, which strikes me as a crazy smart thing to do. Stop beating your head against the wall. Try something that works before you lose your mind. Post a job for free at ZipRecruiter.com row that's ZipRecruiter.com ro the smartest way, not the dumbest way or the hardest way, or the most expensive, least effective, but instead the smartest way to hire.
- [41:45]
Janya Kellick
I think it's right at the top of my list, but I have to qualify that. Okay. People don't deal with, well, with crimes against humanity. There's a famous anecdote with Jan Karski. Jan Karski was a Polish nobleman who saw what was happening and he understood the Holocaust was happening during World War II. And he got out of Poland, traveled to the UK, to the US and tried to explain to people they are killing people en masse. People would not believe him. There's a famous line, you know the Felix Frankfurter who was the AG at the time in the US has this famous line where he says something. This is a paraphrase. I'm not saying that the guy was lying. I'm saying that I was unable to believe him. Okay. But I and people, you know, have say all sorts of bad things about Frankfurter. This. But I thought it's a very telling and honest line. I think it's. I think he was being honest. We don't want to believe that people do such things. By the way, another anecdote, this is just from a few days ago in Arkansas. There's one of these laws. They won't let Medicare pay for anything transplant related in China and also to stop genomics collection. That's the second part to that law that they're working on over there. Okay. One of the Democratic senators, Arkansas senators Explained that he actually. Why is he for this law? Because he had a friend who's an ophthalmologist who was working in China and you know, they, they needed, they were. They did like 13 patients. They were going to do some sort of experiment around a cornea for. Right. And he's like, oh, we don't have the corneas. And he just mentioned it to them. And the next day 13 corneas magically appeared. Right. And this guy. And that guy was shocked and stunned and didn't know what to say when he was there. But the point is like, this is. This is what can happen. Basically on order. You can do stuff like that over there.
- [43:42]
Mike Rowe
I'm just so struck. I kind of just glossed over it a minute ago. But it is Michael Crichton. It is Coma. When I look at Star Trek sometimes it's amazing how fantasy and fact, reality and science fiction can just come smashing together.
- [44:02]
Janya Kellick
I remember Coma too. And also there's a newer kind of cuoma like film called the island, which was more sci fi, which again, kind of same. Leonardo DiCaprio.
- [44:12]
Mike Rowe
Was that the Island?
- [44:14]
Janya Kellick
The island was Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. I don't know why I remember that. Maybe because I found. Fair enough, fair enough.
- [44:25]
Mike Rowe
If I weren't on an island with Scarlett Johansson for a while. Yeah.
- [44:28]
Janya Kellick
Let me answer your question about is it number one? So it's number one because if you understand that this regime does that to its own people at scale, is perfectly happy to do it, and is completely uninterested in stopping it, who is our trade partner? Who are we working with? Do we. Can we assume that we have the same shared values? Does it make sense for us to still be pumping money into Chinese military companies through index funds? I mean, I could talk about, does it make sense for us to and basically entrust the lion's share of our genetic drug supply chain to that country, which is where we're at at this moment, does that make sense if, you know, if you understand that this is what this regime sanctions and frankly profits of and services it's super elite with.
- [45:23]
Mike Rowe
Well, obviously the answer to that question is simple until at least for a lot of people, that you attach the consequence to it. So in a vacuum, I mean, who among us today doesn't look back 170 years and say, isn't it crazy how we wrestled with this whole slavery thing? Isn't it crazy how it tore the country in half? Isn't it crazy that we had to fight a war? What the heck was wrong with us. And yet 170 years ago, I think the conversation was probably very similar. If you framed, in other words, the entire conversation around the economic impact of outlawing slavery on this country, any economist in that silo would conclude this is a horrible idea. It's going to impact obviously the Triangle Trade, but the north as well as the South. It's going to be a disaster for our economy to get rid of a giant unpaid workforce. Therefore we can't do it. That was the analysis and that was the conclusion right up until the point where we just couldn't. We just couldn't live with it anymore. So I, you know, obviously I wasn't around then, but when I think about that, it's hard not to think today about, fill in the blank, capital punishment, abortion 150 years from now. Maybe it's meat eating, who knows? But it sure seems like if you really want clarity, your example is the best one. We're in business with people who are selling organs harvested without the permission of their owners and sold for billions of dollars.
- [47:06]
Janya Kellick
Or you know, it's a murder. I mean, I call it sometimes a murder for organs industry, which is really kind of non euphemistically what it is. It's particularly, I think, reprehensible that the people that are being killed are, you know, entirely innocent. But frankly, it would be the same whoever it was that was being used.
- [47:24]
Mike Rowe
Yeah, okay, well then how. I mean, I'm just thinking. I just had dinner the other night with a friend who runs a big Fortune 500 company and whose stock is crushed right now. This person is upset, you know, with this economic policy and a big part of their supply chain is wrapped. That's the person you should be asking the question to. Because I can sit here and tell you, of course, we shouldn't be in business. Look, my skin crawled when I saw those officials go into the stands at the NBA game and take the banners from people who were saying free Uyghurs. That's how captured the NBA is and that's how captured. I'll just say it, people will hate me for it. But if you're a die hard fan of the NBA, how much of this do you want to know about? You come home, you just want to watch the game. You just want to watch a great game. Do we really have to see this on that guy's sneakers and these banners and the thing. That's what I meant before. When push comes to shove, half the country, they don't want to hear what you're saying. And they don't want to see what we're talking about.
- [48:32]
Janya Kellick
Because the answer is it means that you have to do something. That's the corollary, right? If you really believe this is real, if you accept it now, you know, or you could be like, well, there's nothing I can do. I'll live with it. I suppose you could, but I think for a lot of people, we got to do something here. This is crazy. This is too. And why do you think that it's going to stay over there? That's my question to you, right? If you're going to work sort of hand in glove with a regime like that, what makes you think that that's not going to come here in some form, Right? I mean, this is like we worked with Nazi Germany, right? When you first were talking about slavery, I thought you were talking about that example. It's very analogous. There was a lot of trade. I mean, you know, the famously IBM punch cards, you know, computing punch cards, were used in some of their documentation of, of what they were doing in the, in the concentration camps. Right? As if I, if I recall correctly. But certainly IBM was deeply invested there and many other companies. Right.
- [49:32]
Mike Rowe
I don't even know how to think about it. You're not an economist and neither am I. But, but when you look at, when you come at the whole tariff question through that lens, I call it like a Tier 1 lens. And then there's the Tier 2 lens. The Tier 2 is just economists all basically agreeing that tariffs wreak havoc. There's no real disagreement. They can be used here and there, they say. But by and large, if the economy is the most important thing in your conversation, you'll conclude what everybody seems to have concluded. But it's this other thing that I don't think anybody wants to talk about. And when you start to talk about it, at least in the press and in the headlines, I've seen things get real wobbly real quick. People don't want to be shown that our primary partner is up to its neck in any number of things that we simply wouldn't tolerate over here. It's just denial.
- [50:27]
Janya Kellick
Well, here's the terrible truth, right? The terrible truth is that the Chinese regime wages what can be called unrestricted warfare. This is a, a little bit. A book that's gotten a little bit of fame. More recently people have been writing about it. It was written by two Chinese colonels about how to take anything, basically anything that is weaponizable outside of actual kinetic war, and use that to wage war. Okay. For instance, for Instance, I mean, we can talk. There's a doctrine of three warfares, okay? So one is by changing public opinion, another one is by launching lawsuits. Okay. Another one is by getting the US to fund you massively for your military growth, for example. Right. So, you know, until not too long ago, the Thrift Savings Plan, which is where all our military's pensions are located, was actually invested in multiple Chinese military companies. If you can imagine that. If you can imagine that being true and lasting for years, even with people knowing about it. Right. There's all these, you know, msci, there's multiple index funds that passively. You want to buy in, you want to get. Most of these funds have what are called emerging markets components, which have a big Chinese component. And there's an undisclosed amount of Chinese companies in there, and in many cases, they're Chinese military companies. So if you're invested in these funds, there's a really good chance, unless you specifically get a fund that says, we don't do this, which is very rare, you're invested in that. So you want to talk about. I can't speak for President Trump, but Trump might say they're very smart to do that. Right, sure. This is very cunning. This is very. What an amazing approach. How is it that. How is it that all the stocks listed on US Exchanges of Chinese companies don't require a proper audit, and it's the only country that gets that exemption? You know, and there's a reason, because you want to believe that the thing that you're buying is really worth what you say it is. Right.
- [52:36]
Mike Rowe
How can you not sue a pharma pharmaceutical company?
- [52:39]
Janya Kellick
So listen, there's a instrument called a vie. Okay? What is a vie? If you actually buy that stock, that unaudited stock, Chinese stock on a U.S. exchange, okay. You're not actually buying that stock even. You're buying a piece of a company in the Cayman Islands, which is a contract with a Chinese company, which the SEC itself, based on Chinese law, believes it might be illegal. And you've invested by doing that. About the estimate is something like $700 billion over the years in that. And the actual value of those companies, we don't really know. It's what the prospect has told us. Now, how embarrassing is that to a company that did that to think that what they actually have there is just on paper and not real and can be seized at any moment?
- [53:30]
Mike Rowe
How much IP do you think the Chinese steal year over year?
- [53:34]
Janya Kellick
There's various estimates. Okay, but some estimates are a trillion dollars a year. I mean, averaged out across the time period that that IP would hold, I've seen between 500 billion to a trillion a year as estimates.
- [53:50]
Mike Rowe
So smart people in our government know this. And what's the analysis? They just put that into the calculus and say, you know what, it's a toll. It's the cost of doing business. And in the end it's still in our favor to do this.
- [54:07]
Janya Kellick
Well, what I think happened, and this actually speaks to a topic which is very close to both of our hearts, Mike, which is the hollowing out of the middle class and the working class over these last. Since probably the heyday was the early 70s where a lot of that wealth was held in that group. We developed what's called a financialization economy in my mind, I don't know if others call it that, but. But basically cheap credit allowed for people who have access to capital, which is the upper rung of society, to basically take inordinate risks with money in that process. And this is obviously way more complicated than what I'm painting here, but people made a ton of money just by manipulating money. And this is a lot of Wall street money of that ilk. My suspicion is that that sort of moving out of a place. Do you know actually, you know Pretty Woman, right. It's such an interesting film from years ago. But this is, this is actually the theme there, right? The guy is this guy Richard Gere. Richard Gere, who by the way, China blacklisted and killed his career. But that's a whole nother discussion.
- [55:19]
Mike Rowe
Free Tibet, right?
- [55:21]
Janya Kellick
Exactly, exactly. He's this guy who does financialization stuff and he's about to take apart. I think it was a shipbuilding company if I recall correctly. How I have a terrible, terrible memory for most things. Fantastic memory for movie plots. I don't know why. Anyway, that's the point. It was this shift into doing the kind of stuff Richard Gere was doing as opposed to the guy he was going to crush. But in the end, because of the intervention of Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts, he changed his mind and decided to build things. So we stopped actually having to make meaningful things to make money. Just it became this weird casino game. And if you get, if you could game the system, if you were. If you had loaded dice in some ways and so of course you could, you could do even better. And then you could also make a lot hand over fist money by just off the fees of doing this. Right? And I think that's where things went wrong because you started invest. Initially there was this big, you know, Kissinger doctrine time basically you were told you have to invest all the money in communist China right? Now. That's where the market's going to be in the future. If you don't do it now, someone else will get it. And there's a small group thing mania to do that. And what did you give away? Well, if you actually tried to move your manufacturing over there, right, you actually have to give away all your IP in the process. That's part of the deal, right? So not only was there the theft that we were just talking about, that trillion dollar, there's all the kind of legal. Let's call it legal theft, right? Because you agree in order to get the market, I'm going to sacrifice my. My intellectual property.
- [56:54]
Mike Rowe
This is really. I mean, I guess I'm saying something obvious, but a big part of this conversation simply comes down to what part of the animal are you unwilling to look at, Right? Back to slavery, it was easier to tolerate it even though you knew your clothes were spun from cotton picked by slaves. Maybe you're up in Massachusetts or Maine or whatever, right? It's like once removed. Or if you're right down there on the plantation, you're so used to it, you grew up with it, right? So Pretty Woman is like, weirdly analogous for me. Garry Marshall, charming movie for all the reasons you said. Just don't spend too much time thinking about the fact that she's a prostitute, right? And the movie certainly doesn't spend too much time showing you in the act of what a daily prostitute does. There's not too much business with her pimp, and there's not too much time spent, you know, with the. The whole underlying debasement of the whole thing. So as a viewer, right, you pay your 8 bucks back in the day and you go in and you sit down and you watch this movie. And you're either charmed by it or because you're willing to look away from certain ugly parts, or you're appalled by it because you're being told, wait a second. Don't spend too much time thinking about the reality of prostituting yourself. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's a stretch, but I look at the tariffs, I look at China, and I hear people on the air every day saying, yeah, look, they're not. They're not perfect, the Chinese, right? I mean, wonderful people, wonderful people. The government. See, I remember the argument too, that went well. Part of the reason we're gonna wade in with these characters is because we want to export American values as well as American products. We think It'll be good for the global world order for, you know, hundreds of millions of Chinese to get a load of our stuff. But China's doing the same thing. Who do you think has exported more of their philosophy successfully into the other country?
- [59:13]
Janya Kellick
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- [59:17]
Mike Rowe
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- [60:37]
Janya Kellick
You know, I've talked with many well meaning people and former senators, present day congressional members and senators, said I believed it, who said I believed we were exporting the greatest things about America right over there. But really what happened was they changed us again. Let's go back to this, right? That the nature of the thing that is most important, and that's why I put this organ issue at the top of the list, even though it's so difficult, is you have to understand that if you understand the nature of the regime, you would treat it differently, right? If you understand, like if I knew that the person I'm dealing with is a psychopath and has a great record of behaving as a psychopath, I would treat that person different. I would maybe not ask them to babysit for my kids, right? I might not do business with them because what would happen? Well, it would kind of be predictable, wouldn't it? What would happen, right? You see what I'm saying? Like it's Just if you, if you. This is the part that we've had, the hardest part. And it's not the Chinese people, this is. I'm with those people that you mentioned earlier, by the way. Let's say. Oh, it's, it's not the people, it's the government. Yeah, absolutely. Chinese people, unbelievably industrious, right. Good hearted. I mean this truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. This is ancient Chinese culture. Come back. And Ethan Gutman actually describes Falun Gong as a kind of a revivalist movement, Buddhist revivalist. I don't know if I quite agree with that, but it's an interesting way to characterize it. Right. And this is actually a Western ideology that's been foisted on them. Communism. It's nothing that. Communism with Chinese characteristics still Communism as they euphemistically call it. So no, it's the regime that you have to understand the nature of. And of course, and it does co opt people into behaving some people. But then there's this huge. I mean this is the untold story. Actually. I don't think we've done as good a job as we should have at Epoch Times to tell the story, but the Falun Gong have actually changed a lot of people's hearts and minds through their grassroots effort to explain to people that we're not the things. This hate propaganda is telling you that actually communism isn't good. You should quit the Communist party. There's over 400 million people that have decided to do that, that have decided to quit the Communist Party over 25 years. You know, it's one by one, it's over a long period of time, but it's not even a public thing, but, but somewhere inside someone said, you know, I'm kind of done with this, I'm done with this system and I'm ready for a better future. I think there's hope in that.
- [63:14]
Mike Rowe
What do you think we should do vis a vis the tariffs? Should we be doing business with China?
- [63:22]
Janya Kellick
Well, the answer is if we are going to be doing business, we have to do it with an understanding of what they're about and that they're seeking to subvert us. The problem with communist regimes is that any free society. This is why you keep hearing about Taiwan. The People's Liberation army has been inculcated with the idea that Taiwan is Chinese and that we're going to take it one day and you're going to be a part of that. Why? Well, a big part of it is because it's a Great shining example of a very successful emergent democracy. And it says. The Chinese regime's propaganda says the only way to deal with the Chinese people is with an iron fist. They can't really do freedom. But here we have a. In some ways, Taiwan is more successful as a democracy than we are here. In some ways. I'm not going to say it across the board because actually all of these, every single democracy came out of this one, you know, really.
- [64:26]
Mike Rowe
Sure.
- [64:26]
Janya Kellick
And same with Hong Kong. Right? Hong Kong now being turned into day after day, into something much closer to what Communist China is actually quite quickly. Similarly, it's not. Can't exist because it's an anathema.
- [64:41]
Mike Rowe
It.
- [64:42]
Janya Kellick
It proves the. It shows that we don't need to do things in this totalitarian way and be incredibly successful. Maybe even if China, and this is, you know, maybe even if China didn't have it, maybe China would be more successful than we'd have. You know, maybe it would be a problem we would want to have, wouldn't it?
- [65:01]
Mike Rowe
I would think so.
- [65:02]
Janya Kellick
It would be a problem where it would challenge us to, you know, work our butts off to. To. Instead of. Instead of having this sort of pathocratic, you know, system which has to steal its ip, basically take advantage of. Of free nations to. To grow itself, kill a lot of people in the process, to do things like organ harvesting. I don't know. I think a free China would be a. It would be an incredible thing. And of course, there's plenty of people who believe that there.
- [65:33]
Mike Rowe
What's baffling is that people will push back against that and tell you why. Right. I mean, there's. It just seems like such an obvious thing to want. But again, when I look at the conversations that are happening around the trade thing, it's way more Tier two than Tier one. So I'm still not clear what to say to my friends at polite dinner parties.
- [65:58]
Janya Kellick
Okay.
- [66:00]
Mike Rowe
I really don't.
- [66:01]
Janya Kellick
Well, listen, I'm also not an economist. I've talked with some really great people on this. Some are not sure. What I can talk about is, for example, okay, I was over at the White House when, you know, Liberation Day. On Liberation Day, there's more press there than I've ever seen in my life. You know, it was just like, everywhere, press everywhere, in the. In the sticks, as they're called. And I looked at those tables that were published, right. And in two minutes, it was very clear to me that this whole thing was all about China. Why did I think that? I didn't. I mean, this Was just my, you know, instant response. Why?
- [66:37]
Mike Rowe
Talking about the charts with all the individual countries listed with all the different tariffs applied.
- [66:42]
Janya Kellick
Correct. The thing that I noticed, just looking because I have a mind. I was, you know, back in the day, I was biologist and I would, I liked dealing with data and it kind of would jump out at me. But the highest tariffs, by and large. Okay. Were all for countries which were what you would call high trans shipment countries for Beijing. So what happened? Right. The first time in 2018 when Trump imposed the first sort of, you know, let's call it economic hardship on communist China. To my, to me, this was the first time, the first time they had ever been forced into a position like, I mean, in probably since 1949. I don't know that they didn't want.
- [67:26]
Mike Rowe
To be in because we're so worried about the whole face saving thing. It's like there's this narrative that says you do not want to put the Chinese government in a corner. If they don't have a way out without looking bad or foolish, it's gonna be bad for everybody else.
- [67:44]
Janya Kellick
What a crazy way to do business or have a relationship. Does that make any sense?
- [67:49]
Mike Rowe
Only if you're so reliant and so dependent. Right. And even then. Right. Ethically, there's not much of an argument, but what in the world are we so scared of if not that?
- [68:00]
Janya Kellick
So the effect of that action was that the Chinese economy diversified and went out. There's more of it outside of the US Right now. We're talking about this massive export economy into the US it's still massive, but it's less as a result of that. But what they did, and part of what they did was they set up. A glib example would be, I set up a warehouse in Vietnam, which was an example, or Cambodia, which are example of countries that had these super high tariffs. Right. And I call it a factory. And then I send my stuff from Vietnam or from Cambodia, but it's actually the Chinese, you know, production just isn't called that. So now we. I don't have the problem anymore. Right. So there's a lot of that, that trans shipment. And then so there was kind of debate. I saw there's a few people that I really, I think had really good takes on this. There's Christopher Balding, he was a former professor from Peking University, economist. He had kind of had to get out of there because he was a little too honest publicly while in China. Very interesting guy.
- [69:02]
Mike Rowe
What did he say?
- [69:03]
Janya Kellick
Well, he basically called out the regime for some of the things that it was doing that it didn't want to have be called out on. And I'd have to think. He said a few different things. I'd have to think back. Exactly. But the point is he would explain the realities, which aren't, very frankly, are not pleasant. Right. Like, Chinese economy is in shambles as we speak. And that's a whole different discussion that, you know, I, I weighed on a number of people that I really trust to talk about this, to discuss. But. So Christopher Baldings one. Another one is a Singapore professor named Henry Gao, who was just pointing out now, so what I thought when I first saw it, I thought, oh, maybe all these other countries are kind of camouflage because you don't want to. You don't. You want to go out and say, yes, were coming after China. Right. That was my initial thought, what Henry Gao was saying. Well, no, actually, all these, all these different tariffs are really there to help bring everybody in, to not offer the loopholes into the US System. Okay. Basically, so this is Trump and the Trump administration saying, we want to have a relationship where you're not gaming the system. The gaming of the system stops. And the entirety of our effort right now is to manifest that.
- [70:32]
Mike Rowe
Have you seen that clip of Trump with Oprah, like, back in 1988?
- [70:37]
Janya Kellick
Yeah, I saw that, too, and I shared it. This is where he's saying that, yeah, it'll be easier to, to extract concessions from our allies. Who knows about the others? Yeah, right. I think there's probably truth to that. But ultimately, look, we let Communist China into the World Trade Organization. They never, ever followed the rules. Isn't that crazy? There was no consequence.
- [71:01]
Mike Rowe
Yes.
- [71:02]
Janya Kellick
It's wild. Right. You kind of let the fox in the head house and you saw what they were doing and you said, okay, Right. For the whole time. Right, right.
- [71:14]
Mike Rowe
But it's the same rationale as, like, border, whatever, whatever. Yeah, it's a border. But what's a border that's not enforced?
- [71:22]
Janya Kellick
Right, right, right. And so that's a very interesting point. Hadn't thought of that. Yeah.
- [71:28]
Mike Rowe
I just think people, by and large, are looking around. And your point, not to make this a polemic, but. But you're right. TRUMP In 2017, 2018, that was really the first time he just didn't seem to care if he hurt China's feelings. And I think a lot of people looked at that and said, right, good.
- [71:52]
Janya Kellick
He did more than that. Okay. With that. And it was. I mean, it was stunning to me because I'd never seen anything like this happen. He put a chink in the whole.
- [72:02]
Mike Rowe
I don't think you can say that.
- [72:08]
Janya Kellick
I see what you've done here. Oh, boy. This is. Now I'm going to be in big trouble. Right? A notch in the armor. The CCP has been insinuating itself into the global economic order, making itself a part of everything. Very difficult to extract. Okay. And in the process enriching itself. Okay. While using lawfare to prevent others from doing the things it doesn't want to do. Because now it's part of these multilateral organizations. But completely ignoring, not applying those rules to itself. That is a little bit of, maybe a slight oversimplification, but very close to reality. Okay. This was the first time where someone said, no, we're gonna. That this is not a good way to do things. In effect. I don't know if that's exactly what they were thinking, but that was the effect of it. Right. And it actually changed the economic relationship quite substantially between the US and China, even that. Right. So to me, right. If, if it was me. Right. Which it isn't, clearly, but this is a difficult thing to do. This is a complex economic system that's developed, emerged over time with, let's say, a lot of people lining their pockets along the way and a lot of wealth being concentrated up in the process. And so now to change that. Well, it's. It's difficult. There's. Is there going to be pain? Absolutely, there's going to be pain. But if you did, if we didn't change the status quo, I would argue we're going to end up basically a vassal. Vassals to a murderous regime. I mean, and I mean that very seriously. Like, people don't like when you say things like that. Right. Because it's seems lambastic or inflammatory and so forth. No, this is like it, it's really bad. It's a gross dereliction of any sense, the basic sense of ethics that any normal human being would have. Right. That's who we're dealing with.
- [74:27]
Mike Rowe
You personally are 100% certain that the organ harvesting thing is clear and present and huge. And if people listening want to go somewhere and do some research for themselves, where would you send them? Is there, is there an objective place?
- [74:46]
Janya Kellick
I think the Oregon Tribunal. Right. I said the website earlier. Now I'm blanking on it. But the.
- [74:53]
Mike Rowe
Was it the China.
- [74:54]
Janya Kellick
Chinatribunal.org is a really good place to get an overview. Let me mention another thing which I think is quite important. Right. How does this affect us here?
- [75:04]
Mike Rowe
Yeah.
- [75:05]
Janya Kellick
Right. I talked a little bit about how there's these Operation Fox Hunt things where, see, from the perspective of Communist China, if you're Chinese, they kind of own you.
- [75:17]
Mike Rowe
So if you're.
- [75:18]
Janya Kellick
So they believe it doesn't matter if you're Chinese, American doesn't matter as long as. If you're Chinese, they're kind of. You're kind of under their, under their jurisdiction. They kind of imagine that. Okay, so, you know, we have this. Right now. We have this crazy situation. I was just in New York last week. There was an 18 show run of Shen Yun, you know, the, the dance performance. My wife and I go every year. We've been going for, for a long time. It's a kind of a new show every year. Incredible thing. Bomb threats. Okay. Threats on people's lives, harassment of family members that might still be back there. Lawfare, 10 hit pieces by the New York Times in the last six months. It's all being basically foisted on what's essentially an American dream success. An American dream success story. People who built a dance company out of nothing and service a million audience a year now out of upstate New York.
- [76:17]
Mike Rowe
That's. Yeah, I've been meaning to see it. But why is the New York Times like, where's the meat on the bone in an article about this that is so problematic?
- [76:30]
Janya Kellick
Well, there's, there's a. Again, few things off the top of my head. One, you're familiar with Trump hush money. You remember there's this Trump hush money scandal, so to speak.
- [76:41]
Mike Rowe
Was it around years ago?
- [76:44]
Janya Kellick
Stormy Daniels?
- [76:44]
Mike Rowe
Oh, sure.
- [76:45]
Janya Kellick
Okay. So Dershowitz described this like the worst case he's seen in 60 years of his, you know, practice as a lawyer or something like this. Right. But it seems like the model of that case was there's a whole bunch of articles that are written by media. In this case, it was the Wall Street Journal that trigger an investigation and then demonization occurs. Okay. So to speak. That's, that's the model. And, you know, two people that did that investigation moved over to the New York Times and they're doing that investigation on Shenyun now. And seemingly with a similar. Also multiple articles, also things that are, you know, very difficult to prove or disprove. There's a, there's a woman that actually was a. A Shen Yun dancer, ended up going to Taiwan after she, I guess, retired. Right. Started her own dance school, sent multiple dancers back to Shenyun to. So they, you know, to, to participate and so forth. Got married with the, with somebody who was connected from, I think from Taiwan Connected to Communist China, started working with the Beijing Dance Academy, which is of course a CCP outfit, and subsequently launched civil lawsuits against Shen Yun. How did this happen? It's not clear. She seemed to have had a really amazing experience to the point where she was providing these wonderful dancers. But what we do know is that Communist China has a particular interest lately in. In the last couple of years. And they've made this, codified this in a kind of raising it to the level of the Minister of State Security to basically, I don't know, handicap Falun Gong, Falun Gong activities overseas. So this is how it's manifesting. And my guess is it's because they're effective. Effective in exposing the regime for what it does. Effective in China, getting people to quit the Communist Party. They're trying to do. We're talking about the Free Tibet Movement, Right, The Free Tibet Movement. They put a huge effort into crushing it years ago. I think they're trying to do the same thing to the Falun Gong right now.
- [79:03]
Mike Rowe
So what about the Epoch Times? Are they coming after you?
- [79:10]
Janya Kellick
They've been coming after us for 25 years. You know what, you know what Russiagate is when I say Russiagate. Right. So there's this idea that the president, current president, was a Russian agent. Yeah, yeah, we were. I mean, there were multiple people, to be fair, that were writing about it, but we were very early in the game. Okay. And because why. It wasn't even that difficult to figure out that this is not a reasonable narrative. Right. And there was nothing to it. And then later we discovered it was, you know, a basically oppo research and a whole Clinton campaign thing anyway, so forth. But until that time, we were used to being attacked by the Chinese Communist Party for years. Cyber attacks, attempts to get rid of all our advertising. At one point, before we switched to a subscription model, we were basically advertising driven. They would always try to block, you know, talk to people and tell them, hey, don't advertise with these guys. They're against China. You're going to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. All this kind of stuff. Right. But it was only in, you know, those mid. Probably around 2018 again that time that, that suddenly it was like Americans that started writing hit pieces against Deepak Times. It was kind of shocking, but we were used to it. This is. This is what I'm getting at. We're kind of used to being attacked, but it was shocking and really dispiriting to see that now it's Americans that are doing this.
- [80:30]
Mike Rowe
You know, I got to admit, man, I, I was a little confused because you guys were writing a story on me around that time, the first one. And I've been interviewed a couple times by you since then and come to see that I think what you're doing is not only really important, but I'm a genuine fan of how it started. You know, I don't know of any other newspaper that has that story. I mean, you were printing in Chinese for Chinese Americans. It became popular and then it's English and then it's multiple countries now it's all over the place. So I mean you've got to feel enthused or at least optimistic for that.
- [81:13]
Janya Kellick
Listen, it is the American dream story. It's not like they got funded government money or something like that for doing any of this. This is people working their butts up. I know, Mike, I know a little bit about how you're trying to do it with your organization. Right. They built it from. Not actually 95% supported by our individual subscribers. The U.S. epoch Times is 501c3 nonprofit and it's. Let's just say that funding is very diversified, lets us stay quite independent. Of course we're open to anybody who wants to support us for sure. But that's where we're at right now. So I think it's a pretty good place.
- [81:56]
Mike Rowe
Last question. I saw this interview with Tim Cook Apple and the question put to him was it's just simply not fair. The labor is so much cheaper. You're doing all this work over there and it's a criticism I'd heard before. But what he said was interesting. He said no, the labor's actually not that much cheaper. Yes, we're aware of the human rights things and that's a calculus that everybody has to kind of balance. But we're not there because the labor's cheap. We're there because the labor exists. We need tens of thousands of people doing very specialized work in manufacturing and that doesn't exist in this country right now. You just can't find those people. As of January, I think you and I talked about it back in Wherever we were DC there are 500,000 open positions in manufacturing as we speak. If the president is successful and reshores all this and we start bringing manufacturing back, you know, that's a couple million new jobs. And the assumption is if we build it, they'll come. But that's what Obama assumed in 2009 too, with 3 million shovel ready jobs. You know, you're talking to a country who's not that Crazy about picking up a shovel? It seems so. I just wonder if you have any thoughts on how that plays out.
- [83:18]
Janya Kellick
Well, we have to change our culture. I mean, maybe return back to the past culture, which is, I guess, a lot more entrepreneurial. By the way, this still exists in America. People still flock here because this is the one place where you can have this upward mobility in society. If you work your butt off, this is a problem. The side effect of this, and partially I think it was very deliberate, was that we have a society which is a bit demoralized, maybe doesn't even believe in America sufficiently anymore. It doesn't believe that these trades, I mean, this is what you're working on, right? You're trying to make the trades cool again. There's no future without that. However this plays out, however many robots are going to be doing things. I mean, who would have guessed that? I had no idea that it would be the white collar jobs which would get her hit first with AI. There's so many white collar jobs that are basically disappearing now. That's so interesting.
- [84:23]
Mike Rowe
Right in front of us.
- [84:24]
Janya Kellick
Right in front of us. But actually the skilled labor is going to be a lot harder to change, frankly. Right. So I don't know. This is why I love, this is why I was so thrilled to have you on the show before, because you're actually trying to put a dent in this. I think we need an all hands approach and explain to people. No. That trades are where it's at. This is where the future's at. We need to re. Industrialize, remanufacture as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This is the name of the game. And I think when I look at all these actions that are happening with the Trump administration, I think they're trying to do that. Will it be successful? I think it's a very difficult task. I don't know the answer to that. But if you don't try, there is no hope, is there? Right.
- [85:10]
Mike Rowe
You've got to try. You've got to try, man. Look, I'm hopeful that people poke around and learn more about the organ harvesting thing. I think it's better to know it's not pleasant and people aren't going to want to see it, but it's better to know, not just for the whole never again mantra, which I completely support. But these are our partners. These are the people that are making stuff we rely on. And it's not just cheap little trinkets and toys and stuff. You know, we're talking about everything from steel to lumber to aerospace, all of it. Medicine. It's a big deal. I don't know how we unravel it, but it feels like. It feels like you're trying to.
- [85:57]
Janya Kellick
I mean, I think the key is maybe conversations, more conversations like this, frankly, I think if more people understand what's at stake. Right, what's at stake. It's not bombastic to say this. Freedom is at stake. The reason I'm here, partially. Right. And not in Canada, because what happens here is so consequential to everybody else. To everybody. And we can see that. And I think the president just demonstrated this with this terror regime. Look how the whole. Everybody is reeling from this reality, right? This tariff regime. Everyone's asking these questions. What the US Decides to do is so important. If we really understand the nature of this, the Chinese Communist Party threat, we can counter it and we can guarantee a much better world. I mean, America, Canada, I think in the world.
- [86:55]
Mike Rowe
There it is, folks. It's only freedom and Western civilization as we know it. Thanks, John. Oh, people want to get the Epoch Times. Best place to check it out.
- [87:06]
Janya Kellick
Subscribe theepochtimes.com on the top right. You'll see a subscribe button. And Mike, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really appreciate it.
- [87:13]
Mike Rowe
I really appreciated it too. I enjoyed it. Who's your next guest on American Thought Leaders?
- [87:18]
Janya Kellick
Let me see. Who do I have coming up? Gosh, you caught me at a. Give me one sec. You'll have to cut this part.
- [87:28]
Mike Rowe
Sorry. American Thought Leaders is no longer in production. I'll be back again. No, you've had so many, man.
- [87:34]
Janya Kellick
No, no, no. I'm trying to kind of get you one. That is one that you'll know.
- [87:41]
Mike Rowe
No, no. Aside from me, who should people go listen to you interview? What's your favorite interview in the last year or two?
- [87:50]
Janya Kellick
Well, let me tell you. My favorite interview. Okay? My favorite interview was with a guy who is the only medical doctor known to have survived the Cambodian genocide. He's a fascinating man. And it's shocking because what did they do? They actually just killed all the educated people. If you had glasses, they would kill you. If they knew you were a doctor or professor, I think they would kill you. Right? This was the. This was the revolution. It's hard to imagine, right? That's why it's so shocking. Like, how would you know it's the only medical doctor? Well, they. They went after all of them and he ran off into the. He pretended to be a workman, eventually ran off into the forest and lived to tell the tale but he's also a philosopher. Just like an unbelievable guy.
- [88:36]
Mike Rowe
What's his name?
- [88:38]
Janya Kellick
Nal Om.
- [88:39]
Mike Rowe
Nal Om. All right.
- [88:41]
Janya Kellick
Yeah. On American Thought. You can look it up on. I think we have that one in full on YouTube, so you could check that out.
- [88:47]
Mike Rowe
Well, you got the best guests ever. Present company somewhat excluded. Please come back sometime. Appreciate it.
- [88:54]
Janya Kellick
And I hope to have you back, too, Mike. If you're done, please subscribe. Leave some stars, ideally five, five five. Lousy little.
- [89:12]
Mike Rowe
Star.
- [89:24]
Janya Kellick
The Way I Heard.
- [89:25]
Mike Rowe
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Janya Kellick
From ancient Rome to where you'd like to roam.
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Janya Kellick
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Mike Rowe
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Janya Kellick
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