BEIJING — China is running out of space for 9 million burials a year and is urging the bereaved to look east,to the ocean, for the final resting place.
"Beijing will become just a city of tombs," says Zhang Hongchang, head of the official China Funeral Association.
With offerings of food and liquor and the burning of paper iPhones for the deceased to enjoy in the afterlife, China is honoring its dead this week as record-breaking numbers of people visit cemeteries to "sweep tombs" in the ancient Qingming festival.
Most Chinese worry more about rising prices for burial plots that have made some cemeteries more expensive per square yard than the fanciest city apartments. The soaring costs have coined a new term —"grave slave" — for a generation that must work hard simply to afford the burials of themselves and their parents and keep up cemetery payments.
Li Xinjing, spokesman for the Beijing civil affairs bureau, says to save the environment and money the Chinese should choose a "green burial," such as scattering ashes at sea or burying ashes under trees.
As China grows richer, its citizens are spending more on traditional rituals and fancy tombs, once banned under Chairman Mao Zedong, who suppressed the millennia-old Qingming festival. It was restored as a public holiday only in 2008.
At a funeral last month in Wenling, a businessman honored his mother with nine flower-decked Lincoln limousines and a ceremony costing almost $1 million.
Its arable land squeezed by deserts and mountains, and its urban cemeteries nearing capacity, China "cannot give excessive space to the dead," says Zhang.
"If you want a tomb, you must accept it will only be for 20 or 30 years," he says, and then the ashes will be moved to a collective memorial. "People say, 'You can't touch my ancestors,' but you have chosen to live in the city," and must accept the constraints Zhang says.
His idea may take decades to break through the desire for a traditional stand-alone tomb that can be swept each Qingming festival, Zhang says.
At the Celestial Longevity cemetery close to the Great Wall, Zhou Weibin, 55, tidied her brother-in-law's tomb.
"Our living standards and incomes have improved, so $15,000 is not expensive now," she said of the typical burial plot fee. But Zhou wants a sea burial for herself, for the sake of the environment. "Our memory of someone should be in the heart, not in form."
