A hot mic picked up Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin speculating about future immortality through human organ transplants. Since we already know that organ harvesting from prisoners is big business in China, those two leaders have joined the pantheon of real and fictional horror figures who pillage young people’s bodies to preserve their own youth.
In the real world, Elizabeth Báthory (1560-1614) was a very beautiful Hungarian countess who was reputed to have murdered hundreds of peasant girls so that she could bathe in their blood to counteract aging. Modern revisionists claim that she was the victim of political persecution, but the story has stuck.
Part of why it’s stuck is because the rich and powerful still believe that youthful blood will keep them young forever. When studies showed that old mice given young mouse blood began reversing some of the signs of aging, businesses popped up in uber-wealthy Hollywood and Silicon Valley offering to the aging rich plasma from young volunteers. While these businesses were shut down a long time ago, an ongoing conspiracy theory about Hollywood is that actors are still sucking “adrenochrome” from young bodies to preserve their youth.
The film industry has long used the trope of evil killers cannibalizing young bodies in an effort to reverse aging or disfigurement. In 1959, a British film company released The Man Who Could Cheat Death, which was the story of a mad scientist who reversed aging by murdering young people for their parathyroid glands, which he transplanted into his own body. In 1988’s The Rejuvenator, an aging actress used brain tissue from young victims to restore her looks, only to turn into a psycho-killer. Last year’s The Substance also flirted with the idea, when Demi Moore played an actress who used a secret, black-market drug to create a younger version of herself.
The bottom line is that, whether in the historic memory, pop culture conspiracy theories, or horror movies, no good guy ever harvests body parts or hormones from young people to preserve youth. That is strictly the preserve of monsters.
That’s why it was both disturbing and predictable to hear two totalitarian dictators, accompanied by a silent third dictator, Kim Jong-un, chit-chat about organ harvesting as a way to achieve immortality:
“People rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70, you are still a child,” a man apparently translating Mr. Xi’s comments for Mr. Putin could be heard saying in Russian.
“Biotechnology is making advances,” Mr. Putin responded, according to the translator, now speaking in Mandarin for Mr. Xi. “There’ll be constant transplants of human organs, and maybe even people will grow younger as they age — even achieving immortality.”
“It could be that in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old,” Mr. Xi can then be heard saying.
Quite a hot mic moment on CCTV in Beijing today as Putin and Xi, both 72 years old, are caught casually talking about living to 150 and maybe forever thanks to organ transplants. (As picked up by Bloomberg.) pic.twitter.com/kC4VTRaobq
— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) September 3, 2025
Putin later freely admitted that he’d made the comments:
“Modern health methods,” Mr. Putin told a reporter, “allow humanity to hope” that “life expectancy will grow significantly.” Among those advances, he said, were “medical means, even surgical ones, related to organ transplants.”
In fact, the future is now. Organ transplants are big business for China:
A plot to establish six new sites in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region by 2030 has stoked fears of forced organ removal, given staggeringly low donation rates in the region.
China’s organ trade is already estimated to have a market value of $1 billion per year - which the Communist government wants to swell.
A liver transplant, for example, can cost around £118,000 ($160k) in China - but with a much shorter waiting time compared to the rest of the world.
This draws in not only recipients from inside the sprawling nation, but also unsuspecting international visitors who travel there for a transplant.
As the article suggests, these organs don’t come from volunteers. Instead, the world consensus is that China harvests them from prisoners executed for the purpose in China’s version of Soylent Green:
The organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prison camps are being forcefully harvested — sometimes when patients are still alive, an international tribunal sitting in London has concluded.
Some of the more than 1.5 million detainees in Chinese prison camps are being killed for their organs to serve a booming transplant trade that is worth some $1 billion a year, concluded the China Tribunal, an independent body tasked with investigating organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in the authoritarian state.
Bible believing people look to God for eternal life. Other true religions believe in resurrection. Dictators, though, aren’t waiting for a divine cosmic form of eternal life. With hundreds of millions of human cogs in their totalitarian machinery, all of whom are there for the taking, dictators will always plan to take immorality into their own hands.
As for me, I sincerely hope that the religious people are right and the dictators are wrong, because the latter’s specific form of evil demands eternal cosmic justice.