A senior Chinese official has called for greater efforts to
promote cremation instead of burial in a bid to save land in the
world most populous country.
Dou Yupei, vice-minister of Civil Affairs, said China's funeral
reforms had achieved a lot over the past several decades, but are
now running into resistance as new graves proliferate in some
areas.
"Bodies are sometimes cremated and then the ashes are put into
coffins for burial, wasting land," he told a meeting of the China
Funeral Association in Shanghai.
"This shows the funeral reform is not complete," he said.
Some large Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai handle
100,000 bodies each year. Nationwide, nearly 8 million bodies need
to be processed, according to the official.
"Where could we get the land to bury all those people? We must
fully implement a cremation policy," he said.
China has a longstanding custom of burying the dead. But
iconoclastic Chairman Mao Zedong took a different view. This year
marks the 50th anniversary of Mao's initiative to encourage
cremation.
Beloved Chinese leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping
have set fine examples for modern funerals, requesting that their
ashes be scattered in the mountains or on the high sea.
In 1977, the government started to encourage cremation rather
than burial, and simple funerals instead of extravagant and
superstitious ceremonies.
About 67.27 million human remains were cremated from 1978 to
2005 in China, saving tens of thousands of hectares of land and
trees and billions of yuan, according to statistics from the
Ministry of Civil Affairs.
In 2005 alone 4.5 million corpses were cremated, representing 53
percent of those who died last year.
"This helped China save more than 2 million cubic meters of
wood, 2,000 hectares of farmland and millions of yuan," said Li
Xueju, minister of Civil Affairs.
(Xinhua News Agency December 19, 2006)