In mid-March (16-18), a protest occurred in Mǎliūtǎng, Xìnyì City, Maoming, Guangdong, against the government’s sudden, raid-like construction of a crematorium. The movement at one point grew to hundreds of people and lasted for three full days. People gathered in front of the Xinyí City Government Building and clashed violently with armed police.
The direct cause of this incident was the Yixing municipal government’s fraudulent requisition of land, which on March 16 abruptly announced that the land would be requisitioned for a crematorium instead of the originally planned “Liru Avenue” to improve traffic conditions. According to villagers, the land requisition was initially justified as part of the construction of “Liru Avenue” to improve transportation. The sudden announcement in mid-March to build a crematorium was completely fraudulent. Here is a Reuters-ported excerpt from Lianhe Zaobao:
The Xinyì City government issued a project announcement for the “Xinyi Yifu Garden” on Monday (March 16), planning to invest 145 million yuan to build a crematorium in the suburban Maoliutang, and claimed that the site was “free of residents within 500 meters.” The announcement was valid until the 26th. However, there is a primary school outside the 500-meter radius, and villages and a water source within one kilometer. The crematorium site triggered dissatisfaction among nearby villagers, who questioned the project’s impact on residents’ lives and environmental safety.
From Gaode Maps, it can be seen that the so-called Maoliutang is actually very close to nearby villages; right next to it is even the Wangyong Village Committee, a highly concentrated village. To the west lies Wangyong Village Primary School, and to the north there is even a reservoir. It is clear that the reform (Zhongxiu) is determined to profit from people’s deaths by placing the crematorium in such a location. It should be noted that the pollution from crematoria is very serious, including heavy metal smoke pollution. The reform, which loudly proclaims “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets,” is directly placing a cremation chimney in a green, mountainous village, spewing black smoke; this seems to be their “environmental policy.”
Later, through some investigations, I learned that the construction plan announced on March 16 was only a direct cause; the deeper reason is Zhongxiu’s (the reform’s) severe exploitation of the people through crematoria over the past few years.
In recent years, there have been many protests by the public against Zhongxiu’s highly profitable crematoria and its violent imposition of cremation policies; from 2025 to this year’s nearly two years, there have been more than a dozen documented online.
Why do people hate the cremation system and crematorium construction so much? Because I am relatively young and have left rural life early, my memory of burial issues comes mainly from what I heard as a child. In addition, Zhongxiu’s crematoria are almost all “officially run,” effectively their cash cows, making it hard to find true disclosures online. So I have to rely on videos and comments from the public, combined with my own memory, to judge this situation.
Firstly, it is extremely expensive—so expensive that one funeral can burn through tens of thousands of yuan. Ordinary people may not even save 10,000 yuan in a year, let alone poor farmers exploited by Zhongxiu. From some people’s disclosures, the crematorium’s cremation fee alone does not reveal the problem (ordinary cremation is roughly 800–1,000 yuan). In reality, Zhongxiu, to make exploitation easy, has no unified standard; as much as you want to pay, you pay. But it’s more like a bundled sale: all services are part of a complete package, and they will find every means to push you to use the entire service package, much like hotels selling various products and pushing their high-end “pro-pyrotechnics” (yes, crematorium cremation is also tiered based on the cremation furnace’s quality, with different costs for different tiers). They push their cosmetic technologies, accompanying urns, etc. After this full package, the cost ranges from thousands to tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands.
Additionally, these crematoria run by Zhongxiu are also inheriting the fascist style of the Zhongxiu administration. I suspect the style is similar to Zhongxiu hospitals. In Zhongxiu’s hospitals, if you don’t privately tip the doctor, the doctor won’t perform surgery or anesthesia properly. The crematoria operate similarly; I have seen more than once that the public reveals that if you don’t privately tip the crematorium, you might not even get a full skeleton; and in 2019 and 2021 there were reports of crematoria demanding red envelopes from the families. As for the crematoria’s harsh attitudes, the 2024 Guiyang Jinsha crematorium resistance incident shows some clues. The incident originated when the deceased Li Yong’s mother was left with only a few bones after cremation. The crematorium’s response was that the bone material was fragile, so the bones burnt away. This shows that Zhongxiu crematoria’s covert persecution is real and may be a daily phenomenon due to extreme corruption.
Secondly, another important reason is Zhongxiu’s violent push for cremation. To obtain profits from crematoria, Zhongxiu’s methods are extremely aggressive. Many local governments under Zhongxiu even secretly organized “body-snatching teams” to seize the elderly’s bodies from families who did not obediently follow cremation policies, and directly burn them. In some places, the town head even led the body-snatching, showing how much profit Zhongxiu bureaucrats can reap from cremation. In this regard, Chinese people have had many struggles with local governments’ body-snatching squads. Especially in the southern Yunnan-Guizhou region, where there are not only class conflicts but also deep ethnic tensions, ethnic minorities are oppressed, persecuted, and violently controlled by Zhongxiu, causing extreme local conflicts. Consequently, Zhongxiu governments rely even more on organized body-snatching squads, arming police and other violent means to prevent local people from conducting earth burial. People have responded with various methods, especially violent resistance, to oppose cremation and demand the restoration of earth burial. In some areas, such as Guizhou, local people have repelled government gangsters several times and successfully restored earth burial, even forcing the leading body-snatching town head to kneel in mourning.
In fact, even outside ethnic minority areas, Zhongxiu’s cremation push is also compulsory. I recall that when I was very young, when a villager died, the body was buried on the family’s land. Later, relatives told me that the government started to restrict earth burial, disallowing burial on private land. So villagers could only find ways to cremation or buy gravesites. Zhongxiu’s cremation push now is written very plainly and harshly in legal documents: cremation is mandatory for the Han majority. It is mainly successful in coastal areas; in inland areas, it is still widely resisted (Henan also saw many cremation resistances last year). In recent years, Zhongxiu has tried various means to force ethnic minorities to comply with mandatory cremation, but ethnic minority communities bravely resisted, and eventually, in the cremation reform implemented on March 30 this year, it states: respect the wishes of ethnic minorities. But in reality, Zhongxiu is still covertly persecuting the people, and the new regulation states that even if earth burial is allowed, the earth burial must be flattened and the tomb removed, and even must be buried in a publicly beneficial cemetery. The regulation also states that efforts to continue cremation must be pursued, showing Zhongxiu’s deceitful intent to extract this money from the people.
I myself have learned very little, my level is rather poor, and I have little first-hand experience, so my views on this area are not deep. I wonder if others have deeper analyses and perspectives. Also, my own material is relatively sparse; if anyone has more material, I hope it can be gathered.