The “Corpse Trafficking Case” continues to unfold, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deleting reports related to the case while shifting focus to corruption in the funeral industry under the headline of “flies, greed, and decay.” Analysts believe that the CCP is using corruption cases in funeral parlors to divert attention and downplay the crisis of the “Corpse Trafficking Case,” which indirectly reflects the vast scale of the black market industry involving corpse trafficking.
On August 8, mainland lawyer Yi Shenghua exposed a case of trafficking thousands of corpses on Weibo, sparking great attention domestically and internationally. Observers question why such a large number of trafficked corpses with high quality demands and long-term supplies went undetected for so many years.
The CCP has yet to provide a reasonable explanation. While mainland media outlets such as The Paper and Observer have been deleting reports on the “Corpse Trafficking Case,” official reports mention that at least 12 funeral parlor directors, deputy directors, or former directors and at least six county funeral management officials have been investigated in provinces including Anhui, Guangdong, Jilin, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Liaoning, Jiangsu, and Yunnan. This has been labeled as the “flies, greed, and decay” case in the funeral industry.
Regarding the CCP’s response, Chinese affairs expert Tang Jingyuan told Epoch Times, “The term ‘flies, greed, and decay’ is the CCP’s attempt to downplay this crisis by making a big deal small and trivializing it. This has been a long-standing tactic used by the CCP to deflect attention.”
“The corpse trafficking case directly involves trading human skeletons and even flesh, crossing the bottom line of humanity, and may also involve organ harvesting and targeted killings. Now, the CCP is trying to portray it as a seemingly insignificant, common corrupt behavior in the economic sector,” he said. “It precisely reflects the immense scale and depth of roots of this black industry chain.”
Official case data from the CCP showed that Shanxi Ori Biological Materials Co., Ltd., a company producing “homogeneous allogeneic bone” products, illegally purchased bodies and limbs as raw materials. During the police investigation, over 18 tons of human bone raw materials and semi-finished products and 34,077 finished products were seized from the company involved.
Tang Jingyuan stated that the amount of finished products is measured in tons, and with such a large quantity and over such a long period of crime, “By capturing a dozen or so funeral parlor officials, they are saying they have dealt with it, and this issue may come to a close. The CCP’s attempt is to shift public focus to other problems, and after some time, nobody will care about the corpse trafficking case anymore. This has already formed a very mature stability maintenance model for the CCP.”
According to material from the Shanxi Ori Corpse Trafficking Case, the trafficking occurred from 2015 to 2023, with Shanxi Ori requesting bodies without diseases between the ages of 20 to 60.
The main causes of death for humans are usually natural and illness-related deaths. The major hubs for “non-natural deaths” are hospitals, including organ transplant centers, emergency rooms, and intensive care units. According to the case data, apart from a doctor at the Qingdao University-affiliated hospital’s organ transplant center directly selling bodies, Shanxi Ori’s general manager, Su Chengzhong, admitted to obtaining over 4,000 human bone skeletons from four crematoriums.
Historian Li Yuanhua based in Australia stated, “It’s essentially a one-stop killing system within the CCP system. Since organs have already been removed, selling corpses and bones for profit is no issue for them.”
He added, “Selling corpses was not unheard of before, but not on such a large scale. Now, it has become systematized and massively carried out from organ harvesting to selling corpses and bones, forming a complete industry chain with both upstream and downstream operations.”
“This is not about money; it’s about doing something immoral beyond belief,” Li Yuanhua said. “Selling human corpses was a crime against heaven and humanity in the past.” He believes that when it comes to the CCP, as long as there is profit to be made, any atrocity is fair game. The expanded scale indicates a growing number of people willing to engage in such crimes.
Records show that state-owned Shanxi Ori was established in November 1999, with production increasing fivefold in 2001. Its development trajectory mirrors the sudden explosive growth trend of organ transplants in the CCP.
Shanxi Ori is not the sole producer of “homogeneous allogeneic bone” products. Currently, there are over 40 similar companies in China, many of which are publicly traded. According to relevant research reports, the market size of artificial bones in China is expected to grow from approximately 4.31 billion yuan in 2022 to over 9 billion yuan in 2029.
Tang Jingyuan pointed out that many companies have backgrounds linked to state-owned enterprises, indicating that the actual big bosses could be government officials at various levels, involving various interests. The entire black industry chain involves multiple departments and institutions, making it difficult to thoroughly investigate.
For the corpse trafficking industry linked to Shanxi Ori, Tang Jingyuan stated, “They (the CCP) do possess the capability for such investigations. With their extensive big data monitoring, during the period of lockdown and zeroing out the epidemic, they could track every minute of a commoner’s whereabouts for days. But intervening in the whole chain means overturning interests of all involved parties.”
He concluded, “The involvement of multiple government departments, institutions, and personnel in the entire black industry chain is too extensive. If they were to expose everything, it could shake the foundation of the CCP in various fields, leading to a major social crisis. Under such circumstances, the CCP is simply incapable of taking action.” He added that the CCP has never thoroughly investigated any high-profile cases involving an entire industry like the corpse trafficking case.