Death the leveller: China curbs fancy tombs of the rich that irk poor

Plots for ashes are limited to 1.5 square metres,about 4 feet by 4 feet. Tombstones are supposed to be no higher than 100 centimetres,or 39 inches,although it is not clear that limit will be enforced. Sellers of oversized plots have been warned of severe fines,as much as 300 times the plot’s price.

“Ordinary people who walk by and see these lavish tombs might not be able to keep their emotions in balance,” said Zheng Wenzhong,as he visited the relatively modest resting place of a relative at The Temple of the Lighted Lamp cemetery. That is apparently exactly what many officials fear. After a quarter of a century in which the gap between rich and poor has steadily widened,the wretched excesses of the affluent are increasingly a Chinese government concern.

Li Shi,an economics professor at Beijing Normal University,said that in 1988 the average income of the top 10 per cent of Chinese was about 12 times that of the bottom 10 per cent. By 2007,he said,those at the top earned 23 times more.

Ostentatious tombs are particularly irksome,because many Chinese find even a simple grave marker beyond their means. In a coinage that captures the widespread frustration,someone struggling to afford burial costs is called a “grave slave.”

“There are many examples of how the rich can afford to bury the dead,but not the common people,” said Zheng Fengtian,a professor of rural development at Beijing’s Renmin University. “This makes many people very angry.”

One spectacular example took place last month in Wenling,south of Shanghai. Five brothers commandeered the grounds of a high school to bid their mother goodbye with pomp befitting a state funeral.

Thousands of onlookers watched the ceremony: nine flower-decked limousines,a uniformed band and a 16-gun salute. One brother told reporters that his mother wanted to be buried with “face.”

Just last August,though,Wenling passed a regulation against funeral “extravagance and waste.” The high school principal,the assistant principal and the government’s head of funeral practices were all fired,according to media reports,and the family was fined about $450.

In southern Hunan Province,the authorities last year began investigating a private cemetery with 67 steps leading to a pagoda built by the family of a former government official after the news media likened it to an imperial tomb. And in 2009,officials ordered the razing of a tomb in a village outside Chongqing in central China,after a local newspaper compared its size to that of a basketball court.

Yang Bin,48,who earns roughly $150 a month chiseling tombstones at Zhenwu Shan cemetery,quietly criticised the excesses of “capitalists” who “are everywhere now.”

“This is how the Chinese are,” he said,after trudging down the cemetery’s steep hill in his thin cloth shoes. “If they have money,they want to show off their face. If you don’t have money,you have to work.” SHARON LaFRANIERE