IPS
- 7 April 2002
Posted 9 April 2002 on RELIGIOSCOPE
A
long-standing battle of the Chinese Communist Party with costly
traditional funerals and superstition here has transcended
secular boundaries and leapt into cyberspace.
People
marking the Qingming Festival - China's traditional day for
sweeping the graves and remembering the dead this week - are
being encouraged to pay homage through Internet instead of
burning paper money and arranging sumptuous feasts on the
hillside tombs.
As
China goes modern and the number of Internet users is growing
rapidly, the authorities are hoping that on-line tributes
to the dead and even on-line cremations might prevail over
traditional burial and homage practices.
"I
think the idea of setting up an online cemetery is a fantastic
thing as it can last an eternity," Ding Xiangquan
said in opinion posted on government-funded Earth Village
online cemetery at www.ev991.com [n'était plus accessible
en décembre 2002].
The
site promotes its free services for commemorating the dead
as an easy way of holding memorial ceremonies by offering
spiritual sacrifices, rather than the usual roast piglet and
joss money.
Nevertheless,
Xiang Dingquan, one of those who visited the site on April
5, the Qingming Festival, suggested that graphics of fruits
should be added to the online memorials to give them a more
"earthy look".
For
thousands of years, Chinese people performed elaborate ground
burials and transferred food, money and goods to the deceased.
In some Chinese burial ceremonies, rice was placed in the
mouths of the dead so that they will be free from going hungry
in the underworld.
In
deeply-rooted belief that spirits of the ancestors had to
be looked after and ritually appeased, every spring on Qingming
Festival people would pay homage by visiting their tombs with
offerings.
Paper
money is burnt for the wandering ghosts in order to satiate
their need to consume in the nether world. Other paper goods,
being anything from a shirt and tie to a luxurious car, are
also transferred to the dead by burning them.
These
traditional ways were condemned when the communist troops
of Mao Zedong took power in China in 1949. The communist doctrine
disapproved of the idea of supernatural world and branded
the homage practices as superstitious.
Five
decades later, the ideological battle is far from over. These
days, the old ways are spurned also as wasteful and extravagant
in the face of concern about the amount of land used by traditional
cemeteries.
In
1956, Mao Zedong and all other veterans of the Communist Party's
Long March signed a proposal to put a halt on all burial practices
and perform cremations. But the proposal never became a law.
Resistance
toward cremation is rife among the elderly and especially
in the countryside, where traditions from the past have persisted
despite the ideological campaigns. Chinese statistics show
that while 90 percent of city dwellers who die are being cremated,
only 15 percent of rural residents choose cremations.
Even
the personal example set by the late paramount leader Deng
Xiaoping (1905-1997), whose last wish was to be cremated and
his ashes scattered in the sea, did little to fight popular
fascination with burial and grave homage.
In
Beijing alone, some 1.1 million people took the subway to
get to their ancestors' tombs in the week of Qingming Festival
last year, according to a Beijing Metro Co official.
"Who
can mourn on Internet?" asked Zhen Guangya, 48. "Only
young people who know how to use a computer. People of my
generation are still going to buy some paper-made gold ingots
and burn them."
When
the government-funded Earth Village online cemetery was set
up in 2001, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued a notice
requiring local governments to promote the new on-line method
of homage.
The
authorities argued that traditional forms of tribute waste
money, cause fires and encourage superstition. According to
the ministry figures, Chinese people spent 16.2 billion yuan
($2 billion) a year on funerals and paying respects to ancestors.
Yet
some point out that Communist Party cadres and government
officials are among those who spend most readily on wasteful
funerals and tributes, while admonishing the public to be
frugal and modest.
In February, the capital of Hebei province, Shijiazhuang,
held an unprecedented meeting of 600 provincial and municipal
leaders to tighten Party discipline and warn against holding
funerals and weddings in "a sumptuous, extravagant
and luxurious manner", the Legal Daily reported.
"Such
conduct will only separate the Party from the masses,"
the deputy-party secretary of Shijiazhuang, Jiang Ruifeng,
was quoted as saying by the paper.
Antoaneta
Bezlova
