China Esquire

I’ve talked about Americans decrying Chinese imported products on this blog, and the need for American and multinational corporations to get their act together in due diligence and quality control. (Dan Harris at CLB had a post on QC which quotes the good ideas from Nina Ying Sun’s post here recently, in case you didn’t read it)

Well this story was so strange that I had to post it. It’s not exactly your run-of-the-mill Trader Joe’s or even pet food melamine case. Instead, Congress is targeting importation of actual (plastinated) human bodies for display from China. ABC News reports ( h/t to Above the Law) here:

Twenty-one members of Congress have sponsored a bill that would strike a major blow to the multi-million-dollar industry that puts human bodies on display because they say the bodies could be from executed Chinese prisoners.

Republican Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri introduced the bill that would prohibit the importation of any “plastinated” human body part into this country. Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions uses “unclaimed” Chinese bodies infused with silicone through a process called “plastination” for display across the nation in an exhibit called, “Bodies…The Exhibition.”

“This is a human rights issue about affording human dignities to people around the world,” said Rep. Akin, adding that he is concerned that the Chinese people in the exhibit did not give permission for their bodies to be on display. “We cannot verify the source of each body coming from China, so we decided the best approach was to say that in our country, you cannot import plastinated bodies,” he said.

This is arguably a QC issue: companies not verifying where their dead are coming from. Of course, I doubt that because it seems like its general knowledge that companies can get bodies without consent from China:

Gunther von Hagens who invented the plastination process puts on another show featuring plastinated bodies called “Body Worlds.” He, too, would be affected as his plastination factory is located on the German-Polish border. Von Hagens says all his bodies are donated and that he no longer works with corpses obtained from China.

So its not quite a QC issue. Because companies are knowingly doing it. This is not an issue of those “evil” and “greedy” Chinese manufacturers, and so, consumers cannot call it that. (unlike a situation such as Panama’s cough syrup with glycerine) It seems to me that the problem isn’t QC, its unscrupulous businesses using China as a source for bodies. And sadly, I would bet that those companies would go elsewhere if plastinated bodies weren’t available from China.

Note, this isn’t just a ban on Chinese plastinated bodies. It’s a ban on all such imports. So it’s not an anti-China matter.

And yes, there are domestic and international standards of decency and laws on the books on what you do with cadavers and human bodies. But this ban is not about QC or about the law. It’s about politics. Honestly, the nature of this debate is sort of sickening to me… which is why I chose law and not medicine. I am not sure I’d call it human rights when we are dealing with dead people, so it’s sort hard to come up with any sort of classification for this sort of mess.

Anyways, I thought it was interesting to at least think about. I hope it doesn’t ruin your lunch today.

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