A multi-province illegal trade in cadavers has been uncovered in China. “Between 2015 and 2021, Li Zhiqiang, a doctor at The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, allegedly sold around 10 cadavers to Shanxi Osteorad, with the price ranging between 10,000 yuan ($1,395) and 22,000 yuan ($3,070),” The Epoch Times tells us.
“This is something very strange,” explains U.S.-based China commentator Tang Jingyuan, quoted in the article. “In theory, even if the cadavers were from organ donors, Li doesn’t have the right to decide what to do with them, they belong to the families.…
“What’s more, Li dismembered the bodies, froze body parts, and sold them illegally and in secret. Both the bodies and their death were suspicious. How did they die? Why there were no families to claim the bodies?”
But this appears to be not a story of just one culprit: “Between January 2015 and July 2023, Shanxi Osteorad Biomaterial Co., previously a state-owned company, and an affiliated firm, allegedly acquired more than 4,300 human cadavers from several funeral homes, a transplant center, and a medical university, to make bone grafting materials.”
Life may be cheap in China. But death apparently pays — third parties?
Note: Image, above, from Robert Wise’s 1945 motion picture, The Body Snatcher, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.