China Digs Up, Incinerates Corpse over Family Objections After 'Illegal' Burial

Police in southern China’s Guizhou province recently exhumed and cremated a woman’s corpse against her family’s wishes as part of their strict enforcement of China’s funeral reforms, which prohibit citizens from burying their dead to conserve land in certain regions, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Wednesday.

A resident surnamed Yang from Datang township in Guizhou province’s Pingtang county told the Chuncheng Evening News on Tuesday “his mother’s body was removed from her grave and sent to a funeral home soon after her family buried her early last month,” the SCMP relayed on November 3.

“Ground burial has long been a tradition in most rural areas across China, but a drive to replace it with cremation has swept the country in the past decade as the government encouraged more land-saving, eco-friendly funerals,” the SCMP noted Wednesday.

Guizhou authorities dig up the body of an elderly woman and cremated it after her son gave her a traditional burial. Photo: ccwb.cn

Datang’s mayor, a man surnamed Huang, told the Chuncheng Evening News provincial government officials notified Yang of the new policy against ground burials “on three occasions before the burial and that he refused to comply.”

Guizhou province sent more than 30 police officers to Datang on October 3 to exhume the corpse in question from its gravesite “upon Huang’s orders,” according to the SCMP.

Huang confirmed to the Chuncheng Evening News provincial authorities cremated the woman’s body.

Police were ordered to exhume the body for cremation. Photo: ccwb.cn

“As per regulations, after the village committee issued a death certificate, the funeral home cremated Yang’s mother,” the mayor said.

Local authorities in Yunnan province, which neighbors Guizhou, recently carried out similar actions in the name of upholding China’s funeral reforms. Government officials in Yunnan’s Weixin county have forcibly exhumed at least 11 corpses since October 23, according to local media reports cited by the SCMP.

More than 5.55 million corpses were cremated across China in 2020 according to data published by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. The figure accounts for 56 percent of all deaths in China last year.

The Chinese Communist Party has increasingly enacted “funeral reforms” across China in recent years. The federal government developed the initiative in response to China’s infamous population crisis, according to Stanford University’s Spatial History Project.

“Over the past thirty years, and even more aggressively over the recent decade, government officials and their private sector partners have ventured to rationalize the spatial distribution of human remains and to reduce the overall number of newly buried Chinese corpses through the simultaneous promotion of cremation,” the project’s researchers write.

“The campaign has proceeded at a staggering rate, with well over ten million corpses being exhumed and relocated over the past two decades alone,” according to the university.