The Chinese public has been transfixed and outraged by news of a decade-long scheme involving the theft and illegal sale of thousands of corpses for use as bone-graft raw material in dental procedures. A document leaked last week by Beijing-based lawyer Yi Shenghua (in a now-deleted Weibo post) revealed that authorities in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, were investigating 75 suspects from numerous companies, hospitals, and funeral homes spanning at least seven provinces and nearly a dozen localities. As of yesterday, Yi was reportedly ousted as director of the law firm he founded, likely at the behest of the Beijing Municipal Judicial Affairs Bureau, in retaliation for his whistle-blowing. All of Yi Shenghua’s Weibo posts on the Shanxi case have now been deleted, despite numerous supportive comments from other Weibo users thanking him for breaking the story.

Online censorship of the corpse-trafficking scandal has been particularly intense. Over the past week, CDT editors have archived and translated 21 related hashtags that were removed by Weibo censors, and have archived and republished 14 articles about the case. Eleven of these articles—including many investigative reports from reputable news outlets—have since been blocked or deleted from the platforms on which they first appeared. While Weibo was busy taking down hashtags about the Shanxi case almost as soon as they appeared, a hashtag about a recent $950 million judgment against an American funeral home for mishandling corpses was allowed and perhaps encouraged to go viral, possibly to distract from the domestic story.

It is notable that many of the censored articles were from major state-affiliated news outlets. The Paper, a digital newspaper run by state-owned Shanghai United Media Group, was the first to cover the story, but its detailed investigative report by Liu Xu was taken down within hours. The Paper’s article dissected the connections between the various individuals, companies, hospitals, and funeral homes involved in the theft and sale of corpses; detailed the follow-up calls made by the reporter; and included the full PDF of the document leaked by Yi Shenghua. (The document appears to be a “recommendation of prosecution” prepared by the Taiyuan branch of the Public Security Bureau and sent to the city procuratorate.)

Two articles from reputable financial and investigative journalism outlet Caixin have also been censored. The first, an article from Caixin reporter Qin Jianhang, outlined the leaked document and provided some background into the history of Shanxi Osteorad (known as Shanxi Aorui in Chinese), the biomaterials company at the center of the scandal. A second Caixin piece focused on biomedical tissue banks, the specific surgical uses of cadaver bone materials, and how a shortage of donations gave rise to a thriving black market for human remains.

Another deleted article, from Phoenix Finance News investigative outlet iFeng.com, was prefaced by three main takeaways:

• The three key individuals involved in the case are Cong Maoyi, Su Chengzhong, and Li Baoxing.
• Shanxi Osteorad is the main company implicated in the case.
• Many of the trafficked corpses may have been “unclaimed bodies” that the suspects obtained from funeral homes using false documentation and fake signatures from “relatives” of the deceased.

Perhaps the most detailed investigative reporting came courtesy of Shanghai Media Group’s Jiemian News. A now-deleted Jiemian News article—from reporters Tang Zhuoya, Huang Hua, Li Kewen, and Chen Yang, and editor Xie Xin—discussed the corpse-trafficking investigation, the history of formerly state-affiliated Shanxi Osteorad, the surgical use of “allogeneic” bone products, and current Chinese laws governing the donation and forbidding the sale of organs and other human body parts. The piece also includes a very interesting history of tissue banks in China and the 1999 regulatory change (approved by the State Council) that classified allogeneic bone products as “medical devices” and made it possible for Shanxi Osteorad to expand its business in that area.

Another censored article, written by Zhou Songqing and posted to the WeChat account 燃犀观察室 (Ránxī guāncháshì, “Perspective Observation Room,” an in-depth reporting brand produced by Guangzhou Times Weekly) provided details about the Shanxi case and a background interview with an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital in Chongqing about the surgical uses of bone transplant material.

Very few articles about the Shanxi case escaped deletion. One uncensored article from China Newsweek explored corruption within the funeral industry and emphasized the need for better government oversight of that sector. A piece from Sina Finance focused mainly on the role of Shanxi Osteorad in the scandal, noting that the company had turned a profit of 380 million yuan in an eight-year period. It also discussed E.U. regulations on the medical use of donated human tissue and organs. The Sina Finance article, although still available online, may have been subject to comment monitoring: as the only visible comment notes, “Strange that there aren’t any comments.”

There also appears to have been some retroactive censorship of older articles on the topic of corpse-trafficking. CDT editors noted the recent deletion of an April 2021 article in which seasoned journalist Liu Xiangnan (currently with China Newsweek) discusses his work on a 2005 story about funeral homes in Guangdong and Guangxi selling corpses that had been marked for cremation. Local authorities had initially denied the existence of corpse trafficking, but information from a whistleblower and attention from the media finally prompted the authorities to open an investigation into the matter. Liu’s article includes interviews with distraught family members who suspected they had received fake or incomplete remains, and feared they would never know for certain what had become of their relatives’ bodies.

In addition to the black market for cadaver-derived bone products, and despite the circulation of other hyperbolic or otherwise suspect stories, there have long been credible reports of Chinese government complicity in the black market for organ transplants: specifically, the harvesting of organs and other human tissue from executed prisoners. Despite the government’s promised 2015 phaseout of the practice of obtaining organs from prisoners, serious concerns remain. In 2017, an international medical journal retracted an article by two transplant surgeons from Hangzhou due to concerns that the transplants in their study might have involved organs obtained from executed prisoners. In 2021, U.N. human rights experts said that they were extremely alarmed by reports of alleged organ harvesting targeting detained religious, ethnic, or linguistic minorities.