Soaring land prices in China are beginning to haunt not only the living — but the dead as well. And following an anguished wail of protests that the “cost of dying” , including the spending on ‘funeral services’, was getting too high, the government is stepping in to exorcise the deathly troubles of both the dead and the living.
The symptoms of a property market bubble that are manifest in China have spread to burial plots as well. In some cities, including Shanghai, the per-square-metre price of burial plots is higher than for residential homes, given the paucity of and pressure on land.
And given that real estate land auctions have fetched record prices for the past two consecutive days — in Guangzhou (in southern China) and in Shanghai — analysts are predicting that things will only get worse.
The Chinese ministry of civil affairs addressed complaints about the exorbitant costs of ‘funeral services’, and held out promises of free funerals for the poor. “Over time, basic funeral services must be given to the poor — and eventually to everyone,” a guideline notice issued by ministry said. It, however, offered no time-frame over which the guidelines were to be implemented.
The intervention comes following several complaints about hospitals colluding with mortuaries and funeral service operators to fleece families in bereavement.
The Qianjiang Evening News reported that many hospitals in Guangzhou had ‘outsourced’ mortuary services to intermediaries, which had then refused to release the dead bodies unless the families signed on for expensive funeral services.
In one case, a woman said a salesman from a funeral service agency had called her to make a sales pitch even before the hospital had informed about her husband’s death.
Apart from offering their services at inflated costs, the funeral service agencies resorted to emotional blackmail, saying it was disrespectful to the dead — and even inauspicious — to haggle over the price.
The government has, since Mao Zedong’s time, been trying to undertake a cultural reform of funeral services to get families to opt for cremation rather than burial, to ease the pressure on land.
But the burial tradition nevertheless continues, and even when families opt for cremation, they wish to bury the ashes in an urn in their ancestral burial plots. Burial plots with good ‘feng shui’ — on a mountainside and near a water body — fetch premium prices.
