This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.
Chinese censors are cracking down on social media posts referring to allegations of a grisly trade in dead bodies by a medical supplies company that is being investigated by authorities in several provinces.
Investigators from the Ministry of Public Security are investigating reports that Shanxi Aurui Biomaterials had been involved in trading thousands of dead bodies or body parts, on suspicion that the company engaged in “theft of, insult to, or intentional destruction of human remains,” according to multiple news reports that followed up on a whistleblowing Aug. 7 social media post by lawyer Yi Shenghua.
Yi, who is president of the Beijing Yongzhe Law Firm, alleged that bodies were being sent to the company from funeral homes across Shanxi, Sichuan and Guangxi provinces, with thousands of bodies in Sichuan alone, and more than 70 families seeking redress.
Their bones were being used to create dental bone implants, according to media reports.
“After the remains are sent to the funeral homes, the ashes the relatives receive may not be those of their relatives, or their remains may be incomplete,” Yi cited an unnamed fellow lawyer working on the case as saying.
Yi later posted additional reports that came in after other lawyers contacted him with similar stories from different parts of the country. None of the posts is now available.
But his posts, and the subsequent media reports following up on them, have sparked a storm of horrified reaction on Chinese social media, prompting government censors to intervene, according to Yi Shenghua.
“I can still see my Weibo post but nobody else can,” Yi posted on Aug. 9. “It seems that moves are afoot from higher up.”
Grilled by officials
Yi later reported that the topic had disappeared from the Weibo list of “hot searches,” and that he had been hauled in for a grilling by his local bureau of judicial affairs, which regulates lawyers and their activities.
In another post, he said he wouldn’t be giving interviews to foreign media organizations.
None of Yi’s posts are visible any more on Weibo, although some users thanked him, while others said they had archived his original posts.
While media reports about the allegations were still visible, keywords and hashtags relating to the story returned an error message when clicked on: “Sorry, but content related to this topic cannot be displayed.”
Links to a Caixin.com article on the case posted to Weibo resulted in a 404 deletion notice on Aug. 9.
Official media outlet The Paper quoted an announcement from the Taiyuan Public Security Bureau in the northern province of Shanxi from May 23, saying that cases in that province had been sent to the state prosecutor for review and prosecution.
“The case hasn’t yet been concluded, and police are still investigating the suspects,” the bureau was quoted as saying. However, a link to the article returned a 404 error message when clicked by RFA on Monday.
Dismembered bodies
Shanxi Aorui stands accused of “illegally purchasing human remains and body parts from Sichuan, Guangxi, Shandong and other places for processing into bone grafts worth 380 million yuan (US$53 million) between January 2015 and July 2023, The Paper said.
It said police had seized “more than 18 tonnes of human bones” and more than 34,000 articles of finished product from the company, and that one suspect identified only by his surname Su had arranged for more than 4,000 human remains to be stolen from four funeral homes in Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Sichuan between 2017 and 2019.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that crematorium staff in Shuifu in Yunnan province, Banan district in Chongqing, Shiqian county in Guizhou and Daying county in Sichuan, had “roughly dismembered the bodies so they could be transported to Su’s company for further processing,” citing case documents and Chinese media reports.
The documents also said a further 75 suspects had been detained during the investigation, which is also looking into claims that the Liver Center at Qingdao University Hospital in Shandong illegally sold corpses to the company, the paper said.
Qingdao liver center director Li Baoxing was named in the documents as a suspect, it said.
Li has previously been repeatedly praised by the state for his contribution to medical science, and in 2005 was listed among hundreds of China’s “Model Workers” that year as determined by the State Council, it quoted The Paper as saying.
