A stone monument in Chongqing’s Human Organ Donation Memorial Park bears 246 engraved names of former servicemen who chose to donate their bodies to medical science. The list is quietly growing: in November 2025, 90‑year‑old Korean War veteran Cheng Ming became the 247th name to be added, and fellow veterans have gathered since to sign their own donation agreements and insist their names be engraved together.
The inscriptions and the funerary rituals that follow are deliberately public. At Cheng’s farewell, more than a dozen white‑haired comrades turned out to salute his closed casket—an austere scene that blended grief with a sense of fulfilment. For Cheng, who was orphaned in the wartime bombings of Chongqing, service to the nation was a recurrent theme of his life; in his last years he repeatedly told family that his body “still had use” for doctors and researchers and asked that it be donated.
Cheng’s decision was not an isolated, spur‑of‑the‑moment act. The process traces back to a veterans’ reunion in Chongqing on November 15, 2020, when a group of former soldiers registered as voluntary donors with the local Red Cross. One initiator had already registered with the Chongqing Red Cross a month earlier; eight veterans completed registrations at that meeting with their families’ prior consent. The Chongqing Red Cross later installed a memorial stone in March 2021, initially engraving 44 names, and has continued to add names—sometimes retroactively at the request of families.
The individual stories that punctuate the memorial make a common argument: a lifetime of service naturally extends to a final act of civic contribution. He Buwei, a heavy‑machine‑gunner who died aged 92 in October 2021, told his son on his deathbed that he wanted his body donated. Li Huajun, a veteran of the New Fourth Army who registered with his wife in 2008, stipulated a final gift to the party and completed his donation after his death in 2017. More recently, another veteran, Zhou Nanchang, quietly completed his registration shortly after Cheng’s passing. For many families, the choice has been a source of pride; for others it has required explanation to skeptical kin and neighbours steeped in burial traditions.
This pattern matters beyond the poignancy of individual sacrifices. China’s organ and body donation system has been undergoing a managed transformation since authorities announced in 2015 an end to the use of executed prisoners as a primary source for transplant organs and promoted a voluntary, registered donor system. Cultural taboos about post‑mortem bodily integrity, low public awareness and a rapidly ageing population have constrained donation rates. The veterans’ example is therefore both practical—supplying cadavers for medical education and research—and symbolic, a curated narrative of civic duty that aligns with state messaging about sacrifice and national service.
The memorial also functions as a social technology: a place where collective memory, patriotic identity and medical needs intersect. Prominent placement of veterans’ names on a public monument institutionalises the idea that donation is an extension of wartime loyalty into peacetime public utility. For the Red Cross and hospitals that rely on donated cadavers, such community‑level endorsements can be persuasive—veterans are respected figures whose choices may shift local norms and, incrementally, public attitudes toward donation.
Yet this is not a panacea. Broader increases in donation rates depend on legal clarity, transparent allocation systems, family consent practices and public education that addresses religious and cultural hesitations. The veterans’ story demonstrates how targeted social mobilisation—leveraging the moral authority of a demographic cohort—can produce steady, human‑scale gains in supply for medical training and research, even as national health systems wrestle with demographic and ethical challenges.
In Chongqing, flowers now lie year‑round at the foot of the stone. The veterans who have chosen to donate their bodies are memorialised not with military fanfare but with plain inscriptions; their collective gesture reads as an appeal to a wider public: a final, organised contribution to the health of the nation and the next generation of doctors.