Cheap graves prove unpopular with Chinese living
April 14, 2014 Leave a comment
Cheap graves prove unpopular with Chinese living
2014-03-29
Chinese people are grappling with the mounting prices of grave sites, but at the same time, they have shown little interest in low-priced burial places for their relatives.
Around the time of the Tomb Sweeping Festival in 2012, the funeral industry association in Hangzhou put 2,000 graves on offer in the city’s cemeteries, each priced at 2,000 yuan (US$323), in contrast with more expensive burial sites, usually sold at around 10,000 each.
The association has only been able to sell 4.9%, or 98, of these 2,000 affordable grave sites over the past two years.
Representatives of cemeteries around Hangzhou will continue to promote the 2,000-yuan graves during the Tomb Sweeping Festival this year, but they said they are unsure as to how successful sales will be.
The steep selling prices for the majority of graves have put a heavy financial burden on the families of the dead, so the reasons for lackluster sales of low-priced graves has been incomprehensible to them.
“The traditional concept rooted in Chinese culture is the main cause. Many Chinese people still follow the traditional concept of giving the dead a proper burial,” said an official from the funeral industry association in Hangzhou, adding that the family of the dead would rather live frugally in order to afford a better grave, instead of buying a cheap one, so that they would not disgrace their ancestors.
A marketing executive at a cemetery stated that the graves that the Hangzhou government had been promoting were for burial within a wall, while the majority of Chinese still preferred to be buried underground.
Those who had chosen to buy the low-priced graves had actually demonstrated higher cultural values as they could accept environmentally friendlier burial practices, while the others had chosen this kind of burial only out of financial difficulty, he added.
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