OPINION> Commentary
Tombs of indiscretion
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-25 07:20

Paying tributes to loved ones who have passed away is a solemn old custom that should have nothing to do with materialism. But the craze for building luxury tombs in some localities has reduced it to a rather unseemly show of wealth.

The demolition of more than 140 tombs, quite a few of them actually built for people who are still alive, dealt a blow to the unhealthy tendency in Yunyang county of the southwestern city Chongqing.

The county is not the only one in the country, where tomb-building has become rampant in recent years. This is in keeping with the traditional belief that the dead will not live a peaceful life in the afterworld until their corpses or ashes are buried in a tomb.

With living standards considerably improved in the past decades, many better-off residents spend huge sums in building tombs for their parents or relatives. Some even do this for their parents who are still alive, believing that a tomb readied will help their loved ones live a longer life.

Driven by the profit motive, some village committees cater to this practice by selling their farmland or forest to tomb-builders.

But this has cut into the already limited land resources of the country.

In Yunyang county, most of the land occupied by the tombs is supposed to be planted with trees to keep the soil from being washed away into the nearby Yangtze River, and the State has subsidized local villagers for turning these mountainous, arable land into a forest.

If more people rush to build tombs for their loved ones, those who do not follow suit will be under societal pressure and it is quite likely that more will do the same. The dead competing with the living for the limited land resources will trigger a crisis.

If the localities, which transfer arable land or forest to tombs for profits, are not severely punished, more villages or counties will follow suit. There are precedents that some localities turn arable land into cemeteries to make money.

So the Chongqing municipal government was absolutely right in leveling the luxurious tombs and returning the plot they had occupied to either arable land or forest. And it is also absolutely necessary to have relevant local officials either disciplined or demoted for dereliction of duty.

Residents need to be told that there are better ways of keeping memories of their loved ones alive than building luxurious tombs for them.

(China Daily 06/25/2008 page8)