China seeks a greener Qing Ming Festival

BEIJING — China is urging its citizens to find greener ways to honour their dead during the annual Qing Ming Festival, calling for low-carbon alternatives to the traditional 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 both dutiful and carbon-efficient, 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 Zhejiang province in eastern China told village governments to legislate for a greener and more “civilised” festival, often referred to as the tomb-sweeping 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 — was frowned upon, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

A local newspaper in Yibin, Sichuan province, reported that some younger mourners are even choosing to honour their ancestors by scanning a QR code to post tributes or send flowers.

But persuading mainlanders not to burn offerings during the 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,” said Nanjing’s Yuhuatai Gongdeyuan Cemetery office director Hu Jing. “It is a traditional custom that cannot be changed overnight.”

Indeed, reports of celebrations on Sunday suggested that adoption of greener practices this year was uneven at best. Local media in the city of Xi’an, in central Shaanxi 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 activities such as ostentatious, tomb-side weeping to strangers may have reduced some carbon from holiday travel-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 during the Chinese New Year.

Along with trying to make China greener, Beijing’s social engineers 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.

China recently opened its first filial piety museum to celebrate extreme examples of dutiful behaviour, including a cart that two brothers used to push their mother around China to indulge her love for travel, wearing out 37 sets of shoes in the process. A classic Confucian text, Twenty-Four Paragons Of Filial Piety, lauds a son who tasted his father’s excrement to test for illness, though these days, Beijing expects children to only finance the care of their elders, not risk their health for them.

A greener Qing Ming Festival will not play a big role in reducing air pollution, said a researcher at the Nanjing-based Green Stone Environmental Action Network. “But what is important is to instil environment protection ideas in every Chinese person. They will realise that even in tomb-sweeping, they can choose a greener way.” THE FINANCIAL TIMES