Chinese Turn to New Ways of Burial

The villagers of Xitianyang Village in the Tongzhou District of this Chinese capital held a memorial service in a nearby forest on April 5, the traditional Qingming Festival, or the Ghost Day, to commemorate the deceased.

In the meantime, some Beijingers were busy visiting websites that have opened online "memorial halls" for Internet surfers to remember their lost kin and friends.

Nowadays, people are becoming more flexible and open-minded about the issue of burial and the way to handle the bodies of the dead.

In general, rural people are more conservative than their urban cousins, but since 1997, the Xitianyang villagers have turned to planting trees beside the urns containing the ashes of their dead relatives, instead of inhumation.

The villagers gather at the forest cemetery every Qingming, watering and fertilizing the trees, each of which bears a commemorative plaque. So far, more than 100 cypress trees have been planted there.

Many cemeteries in Beijing are beginning to provide various kinds of new-type burial services, such as burial under a tree and burial at sea, for local residents.

Cedar, cypress and magnolia denudata are the favorite trees for this purpose.

Advocates of this kind of burial believe that it takes the dead back to nature in a more environment-friendly way.

In the past, Chinese, especially those in the rural areas, mostly preferred tomb burial. A well-arranged funeral was considered a show of the family's prestige.

But over the centuries, the haphazard placing of tombs occupied a large area of cultivable land, causing a rampant waste of farmland, a heavy financial load on the living and serious soil erosion.

In fact, the Chinese government noticed the problem a long time ago, according to sources with the Ministry of Civil Affairs. In 1956, Mao Zedong and another 150 senior officials signed a proposal advocating cremation in China, a country with the lion's share of its population living in the countryside.

Since 1978, when China launched the reform and opening drive, governments at all levels have exerted themselves to persuade people to adopt cremation.

The efforts have paid off.

By 1995, people who chose cremation for their loved ones reached 34 percent of the total, and saved a huge sum of burial expenditure.

In 1997, the State Council issued the "Provisions on the Administration of Burials", which brought funeral administration under control of the law, and reinforced the supervision of inhumation. People are urged to adopt more scientific and environment-friendly ways to handle the issue.

Currently, more than 20 provinces and municipalities are encouraging people to adopt burial under trees and at sea. Meanwhile, more than 100 million old tombs scattered in grainfields and along railways and roads have been leveled, resulting in the reclamation of 6.7 million ha of cultivable land.

Shenyang, capital of Northeast China's Liaoning Province and also a pioneer in burial reform, initiated burials under trees in 1990. By the end of 1999, the city had buried 53,230 bodies this way, accounting for 25 per cent of the total number of the people who died in that period.

Official statistics show that by the end of 2000, the percentage of Chinese who chose cremation has risen to 46 percent, from 14.5 percent in 1982.

The prices of tree burials have been set at from 400 yuan to 1,000 yuan per capita, so that low-income families can afford them.

In some rural and remote areas, where people persist in tomb burials, local authorities have tried to make certain improvements, by offering to bury the dead deep under the ground, with no construction above ground.

Last October, the Tibet Autonomous Region opened its first crematorium.

For decades, the Tibetan people used to believe that only bad people should be burned, while the souls of the good must be sent to Heaven by means of the Sky Burial, which involved exposing the body to vultures, or by Water Burial, which entailed throwing the body into a river.

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