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China has imposed sweeping funeral reforms to phase out ground burial
Alisha Rahaman SarkarWednesday 26 November 2025 07:20 GMTComments
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Protests have erupted among villagers in southwest China against a government order on burial practices, an exceedingly rare expression of dissent in a country with little tolerance for it.
The poor and rural province of Guizhou, about 2,000km from Beijing, has witnessed a string of rare protests since the weekend after the local government imposed a mandatory cremation policy.
The protests reportedly continued on Tuesday as the government pushed back with a notice, which claimed that cremation was necessary to preserve land resources and promote a “frugal new funeral style”.
A compilation of videos shared by the X account Yesterday Big Cat showed people purportedly gathering around government officials and chanting slogans in a rare display of dissent. A villager can be heard shouting: “If the Communist Party is digging up ancestor’s graves, go dig up Xi Jinping’s ancestral tombs first.”
Protests are an unusual sight in China, and their coverage in local media is even sparse. Beijing’s reaction to the protests over the years has been censorship and an attempt to crack down.
The China Dissent Monitor this year recorded 661 rural protests in the country, a 70 per cent increase over the whole of 2024, the Guardian reported.
China has imposed sweeping funeral reforms to phase out ground burials and encouraged people to consider alternative funeral practices, even sea burials. But the orders have invited backlash from mostly rural communities who see traditional burials are part of their culture.
Sea burials have been gaining popularity, with 194,700 such ecological burials carried out in 2024, nearly 67 per cent more than in 2019, state media outlet China Daily reported, citing official figures.
Last year, thousands of villagers in the Hubei province of central China reportedly took to streets to demand a repeal of local funeral reforms.
That was the second mass protest opposing an official policy following the demonstrations against the Communist Party’s "zero covid" policy during the latter part of the pandemic.
In 2021, Chinese authorities faced backlash for exhuming the body of an elderly woman for cremation after her son had given her a traditional burial in Guizhou.
A villager from Pingtang county rued that his mother's body was removed from her grave and sent to a funeral home soon after her family had buried her. “I’m OK if they took her away from home, but why did they dig her up after we buried her," he was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.
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