As Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping walked to a platform to review a Beijing military parade last September, their words were inadvertently picked up by an open microphone and livestreamed to the world. Demonstrating that dictators see mortality as their greatest enemy, Putin said ‘Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, even achieving immortality.’ Xi Jinping referred to predictions that, ‘… in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Before coming to the monstrous crime that delivers human organs on demand, it is important to identify a delusion which communists have long promoted. This is that achievements such as the gleaming skyscrapers of Shanghai or the industrial might of Shenzhen mean the Chinese Communist party has succeeded.

Their original mission, unadulterated communism, was a catastrophic, blood-soaked failure. It came at an almost unimaginable cost to the Chinese people. Most authoritative scholars estimate the total death toll under Mao Zedong was conservatively 65 million people. By the late-1970s, the regime faced a choice: total collapse or a desperate pivot.

The survival of the CCP was not achieved through the triumph of its ideology, but through its suppression. The communists decided the only way the regime could survive was to permit a restricted market economy. They looked to the world and saw that Hong Kong was the ideal model.

What did Hong Kong prove? It proved that the Chinese people are among the most industrious, entrepreneurial and law-abiding people on Earth when they are permitted to live under a predictable rule of law. For decades, the British Crown colony provided precisely that. Ignoring the fact that the determined would even swim through shark-infested waters to be there, the only long-term restriction the communists imposed was ‘no democratic self-government or we invade’.

Until they took it over and broke the treaty to maintain one country with two systems, the communists feared the Hong Kong model because it demonstrated a devastating truth: Chinese people do not need communism to thrive; they only need the freedom to be themselves.

This was the great paradox of the 20th century: the only way communism can work is by not being communist. The multi-billionaire communist leaders did well from their ‘market-Leninism’. They traded their Mao suits for those from Savile Row and filled Swiss bank accounts, all the  while maintaining a brutal, high-tech dictatorship.

So why does a regime with total control over the military, the banks and the internet fear a group of people performing slow-motion exercises in a park?

The Falun Gong became a target not because they have a political agenda – they do not. They were targeted because they were suddenly, and overwhelmingly, supported by the Chinese people. Their popularity was a silent referendum on the moral vacuum at the heart of communism.

The regime could not tolerate a movement that lived by a motto of such profound and simple virtue. As their teachings state, the fundamental characteristic of the universe is ‘Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance’ – the ‘iron will’ to stay true to one’s principles under extreme pressure. In a system built on deception, cruelty and intolerance, these three words are a revolutionary act. By simply being virtuous, the Falun Gong practitioners exposed the CCP as the moral wasteland it truly is. For this ‘crime’ of virtue, they have been subjected to a campaign of persecution, now in its third decade – a campaign that has evolved from simple imprisonment into industrialised murder.

In his new work, Killed to Order – on the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists – Jan Jekielek meticulously documents how China has built a billion-dollar industry on organs ripped from the bodies of live young healthy Chinese. Estimates suggest 60,000 up to 90,000 people are murdered each year in an industry authorised by the dictator Xi Jinping.

This industrial-scale murder is not merely a commercial enterprise; it is a tool for the survival of the regime’s elite. The chilling exchange between autocrats Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, while they walked alongside Kim Jong-un, provides the ultimate proof: they view the bodies of the virtuous as a biological resource for their own indefinite rule.

These victims are prisoners of conscience – Falun Gong practitioners and, more recently, the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang. Xi has turned Xinjiang – literally the ‘New Frontier’ – into a laboratory for biological tyranny. Perhaps the most chilling development is the latest new ‘product’ line. This is their ‘halal’ organ trade which commands a substantial premium, some say 300 per cent, from wealthy Middle Eastern patients. This involves ‘clean’ organs from Uighur Muslims whose bodies have not been ‘defiled’ by alcohol or pork.

Imagine the level of depravity required to convert a person’s religious identity into a marketing point for their own murder. If we accept the conservative estimate of 60,000 to 90,000 victims a year, we are looking at a cumulative atrocity that has claimed between 1.5 and 2.3 million lives since the turn of the century. This is the monetisation of ethnic cleansing. It is the ultimate window into the true nature of the CCP.

Governments and the media must call it what it is. This is a wicked regime. It is the ideological and logistical leader of the world’s Axis of Evil.

Our politicians cannot claim ignorance. They have seen the evidence and heard the testimonies, yet the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse warns that Australia is ‘lagging behind’ the rest of the world. In a submission to the Law Reform Commission only this January, international legal expert David Matas condemned our ‘prolonged delay’ in taking action.

We should be leading the charge for an international ban on ‘organ tourism’ with sanctions against all involved in these gross human rights violations. To continue ‘business as usual’ with a regime that harvests the lifeblood of its own citizens is more than a diplomatic failure – it is a moral stain. When we trade our values for ‘market access’, we eventually lose both.

The resilience of the Falun Gong in the face of this darkness is a light to the rest of the world. By holding fast to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, they prove that the human spirit can never be ‘re-educated’ out of existence.