City aims for eco-friendly memorials

The government said Thursday it wants to discourage people from burying their relatives' ashes to promote environmentally friendly funeral practices and preserve limited land resources.

While cremation is the norm after a person passes away in urban areas, relatives still often wish to bury the ashes in a small plot of land in a cemetery, in accordance with Chinese tradition.

"Our goal is to increase the proportion of people who choose alternatives to burying the ashes to 30-35 percent by the end of 2015," said Wang Qi, director of the funeral and interment administration of the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau.

The administration plans to organize four to five groups of around 100 people each to scatter their relatives' ashes in Tanggu, Tianjin, during the Qingming Festival period. The trip will be free of charge, but only for those who have a Beijing hukou (household registration).

"Last year, 87,000 people were cremated in Beijing and we organized 1,033 people's ashes to be scattered at sea. Now the people who choose to scatter relatives' ashes at sea account for 1.1 to 1.3 percent of the total," he said.

According to Beijing's current regulations on funerals and interments, a grave plot for one or two people should not occupy over 1 square meter of land.

"This regulation was enacted back in the 1990s, but as the economy and society developed, we urgently need to improve the laws and regulations. Beijing is still in the process of overhauling the regulations, including changing how big tombs can be," said Wang.

"We have some government guidance prices on grave land, so we will try our best to make our grave land area smaller, and make the price affordable for the general public, and reduce the price of plots through building publicly subsidized cemeteries," he said.

The cost of buying a cemetery plot has risen a lot in recent years.

An operator surnamed Sun, from the Website 010md.com, which serves as an intermediary for 10 private cemeteries in Changping district, said a plot is priced from 10,000 yuan ($1,610) to as much as 1 million yuan.

"The cheaper ones are like apartments, while the expensive ones are like villas. For example, a 100-square- meter area will have 200 cheaper tombs, but will only have 20 luxury tombs," he said.

"In the areas around the expensive ones, we plant trees, flowers and lawns to create an artistic environment. But we don't break the government's rules, because the base of the gravestone is still within 1 square meter," he said.

A manager surnamed Zhao, from the website gmfwzx.com, which also has 10 cemeteries in Changping district connected to its service, said a two-person tomb starts at only 1,580 yuan. These cemeteries are all State-owned.

"Our high-end plots are from 100,000 to 250,000 yuan," he said.

Shi Changkui, a government administration scholar with the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said the government should control those luxury tombs, make burial affordable, and ensure that every resident has the basic right to have a plot in which to have their ashes buried.

"Burial in land is a deep-rooted convention and it is hard to change this concept in a short time, and people should have the freedom to choose the way they want to be buried," said Shi.

"As most people still prefer the traditional way, the government's proposal to have environmentally friendly ways such as scattering ashes into the sea is not a fundamental way to solve the conflict between decreasing available land and increasing demand," he said.

The most important thing, Shi noted, is that any new policy is formulated properly with no loopholes.

Over the past five years, 12 out of the 14 city-level cemeteries have increased their prices by 25 percent. While the price for burying ashes under trees is much cheaper than a cemetery plot, at between 500 yuan to 9,900 yuan, customers are few, the Legal Mirror reported in April, 2012. In 2011, only 312 tree burial services were recorded at the city-level cemeteries.