China seeks to snuff out graveyard smoke

China urged its citizens to find greener ways to honour their dead, calling for a "low carbon" tomb-sweeping festival on Sunday free from the vulgarity of past years, which have seen the burning of everything from paper Porsches to paper mistresses.

Filial piety and environmental consciousness are top priorities for China's social planners, but it is tough to be dutiful and carbon-efficient at this time of year when thousands of years of tradition call for burnt offerings to the dead - hence the somewhat patchy take-up of government exhortations.

The government of China's eastern Zhejiang province told village governments to legislate for a greener and more "civilised" festival. Flowers, poems, audio and video tributes were encouraged, while burning things of value for the netherworld - traditionally paper money but more recently paper villas, cars and luxury goods - were frowned upon, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

"Party officials should lead people in implementing a civilised low-carbon tomb-sweeping and educate and lead their relatives, friends and people around them to boycott vulgar products for the dead," Xinhua wrote recently.

A local newspaper in Yibin, Sichuan province, reported that some younger mourners are even choosing to do their tomb-sweeping virtually, by scanning a "QR" code to post tributes or send flowers.

Meanwhile, Beijing is promoting another "green" form of death rite, burial at sea, which has risen dramatically because of land shortages and steep property prices.

But persuading mainlanders not to burn offerings during the "qingming" festival will take time, environmentalists and cemetery directors say.

"Last year, some people replaced paper money and sacrifices with flowers but they were not the majority," says Hu Jing, office director at Yuhuatai Gongdeyuan Cemetery in Nanjing. "It is a traditional custom that cannot be changed overnight."

Indeed, reports of celebrations on Sunday suggested that adoption of greener tomb-sweeping practice this year was uneven at best. 

Local media in the ancient Chinese city of Xi'an, in central Sha'anxi province, showed photos of city residents burning paper models of the computerised toilet seats popular in Japan.

Paper mistresses also continued to sell this year, though fee-based services that allow busy family members to outsource tomb-sweeping - and even ostentatious tomb-side weeping - to strangers may have reduced holiday travel-related emissions.

Tomb-sweeping is not the only sensitive cultural issue China has been forced to tackle as its environment deteriorates. Many municipalities have restricted or even banned the use of fireworks at lunar new year, leading to a dramatic decline in many big cities.

But Beijing's social engineers are not just trying to make China more green, they are also running extensive public education campaigns aimed at promoting filial piety - a Confucian virtue that has the added benefit of shifting the cost of China's ageing population on to offspring rather than the state.

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