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Protests have erupted among villagers in southwestern China against a government order on burial practices, an extremely rare expression of dissent in a country where there is little tolerance for it.
The poor and rural province of Guizhou, about 2,000 km from Beijing, has seen a series of rare protests since the weekend after the local government imposed mandatory restrictions. Cremation Policy.
Protests reportedly continued on Tuesday as the government withdrew a notice claiming that cremation was necessary to preserve land resources and promote a “frugal new order”. last rites Style”.
A compilation of videos shared by the A villager can be heard shouting: “If the Communist Party is digging up the graves of ancestors, dig up the graves of Xi Jinping’s ancestors first.”
Protests are an unusual sight ChinaAnd their coverage in the local media is even less. Beijing’s response to protests over the years has been attempts at censorship and repression.
China Dissent Monitor recorded 661 rural protests in the country this year, a 70 percent increase from the whole of 2024. Guardian Informed.
China has implemented sweeping funeral reforms to phase out land burials and encourage people to consider alternative funeral practices, even burial at sea. But these orders have invited reaction from mostly rural communities, who consider traditional funerals a part of their culture.
Sea burials are growing in popularity, with 194,700 such eco-burials expected in 2024, an increase of about 67 percent from 2019, according to state media outlets. China Daily The report cited official figures.
Last year, thousands of villagers in central China’s Hubei province reportedly took to the streets demanding the repeal of local funeral reforms.
It was the second mass protest against an official policy, following demonstrations against the Communist Party’s “zero Covid” policy during the latter half of the pandemic.
In 2021, Chinese authorities faced protests after the son of an elderly woman in Guizhou took out her body for cremation after it was buried in the traditional manner.
A villager in Pingtang County lamented that his mother’s body was taken out of her grave and sent to a funeral home immediately after her family buried it. He said, “I don’t mind if they took him from the house, but why did they dig him up when we buried him?” South China Morning Post,