Making Money Off Dead Chinese Prisoners
Have You Heard of “Bodies . . . The Exhibition”
A controversial show scheduled to tour the U.S. has grabbed the attention of many human rights activists. ‘Bodies . . . The Exhibition,’ presented by Premier Exhibitions, features real human corpses that have been dissected, plasticized and posed. Since 2005, an estimated 4 million visitors have paid to view Premier’s “Bodies” shows, helping to propel the company to profitability – $5.3 million net income on revenue of $13 million in fiscal 2006. In 2007, net income reaching $7.4 million on revenue of $30.1 million, more than 70% of which came from traveling exhibits of corpses and body parts. Business is so good that Premier announced this month that it has obtained more sets of “human anatomical specimens” and will mount an additional six “Bodies” exhibits, bringing the total to 11 traveling shows by June. The current admission price is $26.50 per ticket and children $18 to gaze at 21 whole-body cadavers.Along with Premier’s success has come steady criticism from human rights groups, religious groups, medical associations and state governments about the macabre content of the show, the provenance of the bodies, which come mostly from the city of Dalian, in China. Officials from Dalian Medical University previously have been implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, including organ transplants.
The company, which reportedly spent $25 million to obtain the specimens, maintains that the bodies, which are mostly Chinese men, are those of unclaimed or unidentified Chinese that were obtained legally. Harry Wu, director of the Laogai Research Foundation, said that in China “a paper document can be created very easily, and you never know if it is legitimate. China has thousands of executions a year and the government never releases any information about them – even the families aren’t given notice about an execution until after the execution. We never know where a cadaver comes from, whether it was donated or obtained illegally.”
