Ala Moana Center is currently selling tickets for “Bodies--The Exhibition”, a display of human bodies and organs procured in China. The exhibit is called “educational” by its backers, while critics say it dishonors the dead, commercializes human remains for profit without any type of consent. Detractors also insist that the exhibit almost certainly include bodies of imprisoned political and religious dissidents, and other prisoners, though no evidence has been presented to support those charges.
“If I had to bet, I think most of those corpses on display would have sad and horrific stories to tell,” said Hong Jiang, assistant professor of geography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Jiang says her mother's sister is currently imprisoned in China because of her ties to the Falun Gong movement, and she fears the unclaimed bodies could be connected to allegations of illicit "organ harvesting" from Falun Gong practioners detained in labor camps since a government crackdown on the organization in 1999.
Premier Exhibitions, Inc., acknowledged last week that it has no independent evidence the bodies or body parts are not those of Chinese prisoners, or that body parts were not obtained from prisoners subjected to “execution, torture or other forms of physical abuse.”
The company has previously relied on assurances from the Chinese company providing the preserved bodies that none were prisoners or torture victims.
The admission was part of an agreement settling an investigation by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Under the terms of the agreement, the company is required to “clearly and conspicuously” warn customers in New York that the company cannot rule out the possibility they are prisoners. There is no requirement for similar warnings when the show opens here.
“There is no written record that any of those persons consented to the plastination and exhibition of their bodies and/or its parts,” according to the settlement agreement. “Rather, these bodies were unclaimed at death, collected by the Chinese Bureau of Police, and delivered to the Dalian Medical University and other universities in China for education and research.”
The bodies were eventually acquired by Premier.
The admission contradicts earlier claims that all bodies are from donors who consented to the use of their bodies, similar to the consent given by those who donate their bodies to medical schools in the U.S.
Sarah Redpath, a North Carolina woman who has been a vocal opponent of the Bodies exhibit, told Honolulu Weekly that “unclaimed” bodies in the U.S. have a death certificate that indicates what they died of, if there was anything questionable about the death, and whether police were involved. Often there’s a waiting period of 45 days to give time for a family to show up.
“Unclaimed with regard to these exhibits means ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’. There are no standards, they don’t care,” Redpath said.
“It’s very hard to imagine any ordinary Chinese who would not claim the dead bodies of their family members and relatives,” Jiang said.
According to a 2007 report co-authored by Canadian human rights attorney David Matas, who spoke on the Manoa campus last fall, more than 41,000 human organs used in transplants may have come from Falun Gong members between 2000 and 2005, and the practice continues today.
Jiang said this could explain the large number of unclaimed bodies and body parts available for sale in China.
“Family members did not know where they were taken, so they would have no way to claim the bodies,” she said.
Redpath criticized government officials for allowing Premier Exhibitions to use a “big shell game” to evade laws relating to the handling, display, and transportation of human remains.
Customs declarations use the term “plastic model for teaching” to describe the plastinated human bodies.
“What I find outrageously duplicitous is that they ship these people across our borders described as ‘plastic teaching models’ and not as human bodies because if they are ‘plastic models’, they don’t have to have a death certificate, or show if the person was murdered, or if they had a communicable disease,” Redpath said. “But when it comes to advertising the exhibit and selling tickets, then they’re real human bodies.”
Redpath dismissed the company’s claim that it is only providing an educational tool, saying the exhibit’s real lesson is simple: “It’s okay to abduct a body and dehumanize it as long as somebody is making money.”
[For more information, see www.nobodies4profit.org]
Contact Ian Lind: ian@iLind.net