FORBES ASIA 11/07/2014

Chinese Halloween, More Than Real!

In June 2014 in Beiliu (Guangxi, Southern China), a resident came to the police with an atypical complaint: his recently passed away grandfather had been removed from his grave. An investigation followed, which lasted for a month, and ended up with the arrest of a grave robber. Song – the name of the criminal – confessed of having stolen the grandfather’s body and further 20 more cadavers, from graveyards in villages nearby. Using an unspecified transportation, small truck or “tuolaji” (tractor), he brought them on different occasions to neighboring Guangdong,  hiding them from view by large bags. There, he found clients for his strange merchandize.

Such a trade per se is not new in China, where “minghun” (冥婚) or “ghost marriage” is known to have been practiced historically since the 17^th century BC. But in this case, the identity of the buyers created surprise, as well as their rationale: according to the Xinhua news agency, they were two city officials afraid to fail their state-mandated quotas for cremation, and had thus come to this convenient solution in order to fulfill their obligation. The price paid for each of the 10 bodies, was 3000 yuan. The grave digger and the officials risk up to three years in prison according to law.

Strangely enough, another case of tomb-raiding happened almost at the same time, for an entirely different business reason. According to the Shandong Radio and TV, ninelaw-breakers were arrested at the end of October for colluding, under the command of a certain Wang (a bicycle thief) to dig and sell female bodies to be used for “ghost marriage”.

In one case, a woman which had been buried in Tianqiao in December 2013 was taken out of her resting place three months later, and then sold by Wang to a middleman for 18.000 yuan. Liu (the name of the middleman) hid the body in a hospital morgue, and clandestinely transported it to various cities to show it to would-be buyers. He eventually made a deal in Wu’an (Hebei) with a family ready to pay 38.000 yuan for a bride for its bachelor son who had prematurely passed away.

Hebei is one of the five provinces (including Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and Guangdong) mostly known to be cradles of the “minghun” tradition. According to Zhang Linhai, the Handan policeman in charge of the case, “the investigation is still ongoing”: the sentence will not happen before a while.

Such cases of corpses unearthing are not rare in China. A case was even reported where a deceased woman happened to be sold twice: once, upon death in February 2012, by her parents to another family for 40.000 yuan, and  again a few weeks later, a digger dug her up from her new grave before re-auctioning her to another clan for a slightly lesser price –the robber eventually got caught.

What to make of these odd, and frankly speaking, regrettable happenings? Their frequency in the middle of the internet age, suggests the existence of a growing cultural chasm between cities and villages of China. A certain rural society insists on living by its ancestral beliefs, and defends them stubbornly against the aggression of modern time and against the slow death of their communities. The minghun may be an old timer’s claim of the clans and of their ancestral values, for their right to survive. On the other hand, the fact that the press drums up each and any of those transgressions, stresses a quite different point: the vast majority of Chinese opinion is rapidly changing. It is not –yet– condemning the “ghost bride trade” as a criminal one. But it already considers it as an obsolete vestige of the past. In other words, it might be time for the “minghun” to prepare for its own burial ceremony – without unearthing, this time – and to cross the one way-gate to its own oblivion!