Land Shortage in Shanghai Squeezes Out the Dead

Despite Shanghai’s method of stacking bodies seven or eight deep in graves, the city is running out of burial space and 100,000 more people die each year. This land shortage has prompted government support of burials at sea rather than traditional ones.

In an ocean burial, the name of the dead is engraved on a communal burial monument at Binhai cemetery and the government provides the family with a digital tombstone as a repository for pictures and testimonials. Loved ones are buried an hour off the Shanghai coast in the East China Sea.

Funeral plots with monuments can cost up to Rmb50,000 per square meter, which is more than space in the notoriously exorbitant property market. Thus, those who are busy, cash-strapped, and increasingly modern in their outlook are accepting ocean burials, which cost around Rmb400. Some families are even disinterring ashes and spreading them at sea because cemeteries are offering burial fee refunds to do so.

Land burials in Shanghai are not expected to die out any time soon as only 2% of the people are choosing sea funerals. However, rising sea burial subsidies are expected as the government increasingly focuses on the environment.

See Patti Waldmeir, Land Demand Squeezes Out Dead in Shanghai, FT.com, Nov. 26, 2010.

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this to my attention.