An underground mini-industry for cadavers for "body shows"

Chinese cash in on cadavers

An underground mini-industry emerges in the country with the popularity of shows such as `Body Worlds'

By David Barboza
New York Times News Service

August 8, 2006

DALIAN, China -- Tucked away in the back of this coastal city's export-oriented manufacturing zone is a place that can only be described as a modern mummification factory.

Inside a series of unmarked buildings, hundreds of Chinese workers, some seated in assembly-line formations, are cleaning, cutting, dissecting, preserving and re-engineering human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.

"Pull the cover off. Pull it off," one Chinese manager says as a team of workers begin to lift a blanket from the head of a cadaver stored in a stainless steel container filled with formalin, a chemical preservative. "Let's see the face. Show the face."

The mastermind behind this operation is Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a 61-year-old German scientist whose show, "Body Worlds," has attracted 20 million people worldwide over the past decade and has taken in more than $200 million by displaying preserved, skinless human corpses with their well-defined muscles and sinewy tissues.

But now with millions of people flocking to see "Body Worlds" and similar exhibitions, an underground mini-industry has emerged in China.

With little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs, which appear to come mostly from China and Europe, at least 10 other Chinese body factories have opened in the last few years. These companies are regularly filling exhibition orders, shipping preserved cadavers to Japan, South Korea and the United States.

Fierce competition among body show producers has led to accusations of copyright theft, unfair competition and trafficking in human bodies in a country with a reputation for allowing a flourishing underground trade in organs and other body parts.

Here in China, determining who is in the body business and where the bodies come from is not easy.

Museums that hold body exhibitions in China say they have suddenly "forgotten" who supplied their bodies; police officials have regularly changed their stories about what they have done with bodies, and even universities have confirmed and then denied the existence of body preservation operations on their campuses.

Human-rights activists have attacked the exhibitions, calling them freak shows that might be using the bodies of mentally ill people and executed prisoners. In June, police in the city of Dandong, about 190 miles northeast of here, discovered about 10 corpses in a farmer's yard. The bodies were being used by a company financed by foreigners, the government said, that was illegally involved in the body preservation business.

Worried about a growing trade in illegal bodies, the Chinese government issued new regulations in July that outlawed the purchase or sale of human bodies and restricted the import and export of human specimens, unless used for research. But it is unclear how the regulations will affect the factories.

Von Hagens said he welcomed the new regulations, noting that they would not prevent him from doing business because he operates a research institute and his exhibitions rely mostly on European donors rather than Chinese bodies.

The regulations, however, could prevent Chinese bodies from being exported from China to exhibitions in the United States, putting at stake possibly tens of millions of dollars.

Premier Exhibitions, an Atlanta-based company that created "Bodies: The Exhibition," declined to comment on the regulations, saying it had not reviewed them. Premier recently agreed to pay $25 million to secure a steady supply of preserved bodies from China.

Experts say exhibitions featuring preserved bodies are among the more popular attractions at American science and natural history museums. They have appeared at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and at major museums in Houston and Los Angeles.

But the industry is dogged by questions about the origins of the corpses. Premier says its exhibition uses unclaimed Chinese bodies that the police have given to medical schools. None of the bodies, it says, are those of executed prisoners or people who died of unnatural causes.

Officials at the Customs Bureau here in Dalian and the Dalian Medical University, however, said they had no records showing Premier having acquired bodies and then transporting them to exhibitions abroad.