(cache) Laogai Research Foundation (laogai.org)

Yesterday, LRF Executive Director Harry Wu testified at a public hearing of the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee on H.B. 2299, which would essentially require informed consent to be given by decedents or their next of kin for any commercial exhibits to publicly display their human remains. Mr. Wu spoke forcefully in favor of any legislation which would prohibit companies such as Premier Exhibitions, Inc., operator of the popular exhibits BODIES...The Exhibition and Bodies Revealed, from profiting from the display of unclaimed Chinese cadavers, some of which he believes may be the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners.

BODIES...The Exhibition appeared earlier this year at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Mr. Wu's written remarks to the Committee are below.

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Testimony of Harry Wu
Executive Director, The Laogai Research Foundation

Before the Pennsylvania Judiciary Committee
Public Hearing on HB 2299
August 5, 2008

I would like to thank Chairman Caltagirone and Chairman Marsico for inviting me to testify this morning on an issue which is of very great concern to me and my organization, the Laogai Research Foundation.

I established the Laogai Research Foundation in 1992 in order to document and expose to the world the Laogai, China's extensive system of prison labor camps, which was created under Mao Zedong with the guidance of the Soviet Union shortly after the Communists came to power in China in 1949. The term "Laogai" comes from two Chinese words: lao, meaning "labor", and gai, meaning "reform". Thus, the purported function of the Laogai system is to reform criminals and "bad elements" through labor. Both common criminals and political prisoners alike are held together in the Laogai, which the Chinese try to defend as a normal prison system. In fact, however, the Laogai really has served as a political and economic tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP relies on the Laogai to intimidate, persecute, and silence any political, religious, and ethnic dissidents who are perceived to pose a threat to its rule. Moreover, the forced labor of Laogai inmates generates economic wealth for the state, which forces prisoners to carry out massive public works projects, and for the CCP officials who run the Laogai camps, most of which use the free labor of prisoners to operate commercial enterprises in the fields of construction, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, etc.

Much of what I know about the Laogai comes from personal experience. In 1960, when I was a young geology student in Beijing, I spoke out against China's support of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary as well as the inequality engendered by the CCP within China itself. Shortly thereafter, I was labeled a "counter-revolutionary rightist", arrested, and sentenced to life in the Laogai without a trial. I spent the next 19 years toiling in 12 different labor camps, where I endured famine, physical abuse, and exhaustion, and where I witnessed the deaths of many of my fellow inmates. Only after the death of Mao Zedong, was I able to secure my release from the Laogai and make my way to the U.S. In 1990, Jesse Helms invited me to testify about the Laogai before the U.S. Senate, and I have been striving ever since to continue informing the world about the atrocities of the Laogai. For even though some 50 million people are thought to have suffered in the Laogai, many of whom starved or were executed, and an estimated 3-6 million Chinese remain in the Laogai today, much of the world is still unaware that such a system even exists in China.

My Foundation's research has expanded in scope over the years, covering not only the Laogai system, but other systemic human rights abuses in China as well, including the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, the coercive enforcement of China's "one-child" population control policy, the death penalty and public executions, and the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners. Revelations about the latter subject, in particular, have been quite disturbing.

Chinese medical practices developed significantly during the 1980's, and with the introduction of the drug cyclosporine-A in 1985, medical expertise was sufficient enough to allow for regular organ transplantations. The dilemma, however, was in the supply of organs. There simply is no culture of organ donation in China, and the practice remains very uncommon. Public campaigns to foster such a culture are frustrated by a traditional preference among Chinese to have their bodies buried in tact. With demand for the procedure growing, however, Chinese hospitals and government agencies decided to look elsewhere for a supply of healthy organs, which they found in the Laogai.

In China, there are currently 68 crimes which can carry a death sentence, including non-violent crimes such as corruption, drug dealing, and robbery. With throngs of poor economic migrants travelling from the Chinese countryside to its cities each year, and China's public security agencies responding to the resulting increases in crime with so-called "strike hard" (yanda) campaigns, the number of prisoners on China's death row has been immense. While the exact number of executions carried out each year is closely guarded as a state secret, most nongovernmental groups estimate the annual figures to be in the thousands, more than all the other nations in the world combined.

My investigations, dating back to the early 1990's, have shown that Chinese hospitals regularly broker deals to supply privileged Chinese and foreign citizens with needed organs harvested from executed Chinese prisoners. It is completely ordinary in China for an ambulance to be standing by at the site of an execution, with medical personnel ready to quickly remove needed organs and hurry them off to the waiting hospital. In 1994 I assisted the BBC in producing a major report on the subject, which showed the practice to be a matter of national policy. In 2001 my Foundation released an in-depth report, entitled Communist Charity, detailing the irrefutable evidence on the practice. Still, the Chinese continued to deny these allegations until confirmation finally came in 2006, when China's Vice-Minister of Health, Mr. Huang Jiefu, publicly admitted that almost all of the organs used in medical transplants in the country come from executed prisoners. Such an assertion is astounding, considering that China is now second only to the U.S. in the number of transplants performed each year.

Yet, I was even more astounded several years ago, when I learned that the trafficking of human organs in China had extended to include not only Chinese hospitals, but popular anatomical exhibits that are appearing right here in the U.S. Employing a technique known as plastination, wherein human tissue is removed of liquids and fats and injected with a plastic polymer, these exhibits display neatly dissected cadavers and individual organs to the public for a price of $20-$30 per person. It has now become apparent that one company in particular, the Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions Inc. ("Premier"), is being supplied specimens from China, at least some of which are almost certainly the bodies of executed prisoners, through the Dalian Hoffen Bio Technique Company Lmt. ("DHBTC") in Dalian, China, which is owned by Dr. Sui Hongjin. The contract between Premier and DHBTC is reported to be worth $25 million.

At first, Premier was very vague in describing the provenance of its specimens, claiming that they were "acquired by legal means with the highest of ethical standards." Later, Premier revealed that it was using "unclaimed" bodies, which it said were obtained from Dalian Medical University, though it offered no official explanation of how said bodies got to be "unclaimed". It may indeed be the case that those bodies were unclaimed, but I know that in China this is a category which can include the bodies of executed prisoners. Typically, the families of executed prisoners are not even notified that the execution has taken place until after the fact, and while occasionally they may receive cremated remains of the executed prisoner, they cannot claim the bodies, which are essentially the property of the prison.

In recent months, evidence has surfaced confirming my suspicions about the specimens in Premier's exhibits. An ABC News "20/20" investigation which aired in February provided evidence of this illicit body trade when they tracked down a broker who claimed to have bought more than 100 bodies from the police in China and sold them to DHBTC. He even provided pictures of some of the blood stained corpses, hands still bound, which he saw during his first such transaction. This story prompted New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to launch a probe of Premier's exhibits. Mr. Cuomo's investigation found that the bodies displayed by Premier in New York were "originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police." Moreover, the investigation found that Premier's prior assertions that it could independently confirm that the body parts in its exhibits did not belong to executed Chinese prisoners were false. Subsequently, Premier agreed to disclose these findings on its website and in the lobbies of its New York exhibits.

Premier continues to deny that the bodies it displays could be those of executed Chinese prisoners. The evidence to the contrary, though, is very convincing. In any case, it is now undisputed that Premier is displaying the bodies and body parts of individuals who did not consent for them to be used in that way, and profiting from it greatly. Such a form of corporate exploitation is far from ethical, and it should also be illegal. But I do strongly believe that some of the bodies for which Premier holds a "lease", are those of executed Chinese prisoners. For a group of people who have suffered so much during life to be subject to such an indignity after life is reprehensible to say the least. I hope that the state of Pennsylvania will follow in the steps of California, and pass legislation that will honor the value of human life and prohibit such practices in the future.