2014-01-08
People walk through a cemetery in Shanghai on Tomb Sweeping Day, April 4, 2013.
AFP
Rural families in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian are protesting the digging up of ancestral graves by local authorities as part of wider land grab and property development project, local residents said on Wednesday.
Residents of Fujian’s Houlong township told RFA they were shocked and horrified to find on a recent visit to the graves of their loved ones that the area had been bulldozed and their remains removed without their knowledge.
“One day we went there and found them dug up and empty,” a Houlong resident surnamed Chen said. “There were six graves … They didn’t leave behind a single bone.”
“The government didn’t say anything to us, but it’s because they have appropriated the land,” he added. “He didn’t inform a single household out of our entire family of dozens of people.”
An official who answered the phone at the township government offices on Wednesday confirmed that the area was being cleared for a government-backed property development.
“We have a project there, and we have requisitioned the land,” the official said. “Requisitioning land is normal, but there haven’t been any instances of bulldozing graves without informing the families.”
Officials have requisitioned more than 100 mu (16.5 acres) of farmland for the project, and the government has been carrying out “ideological work” among local residents,” the official said.
“This has been carried out according to law,” he added. “We haven’t been digging up graves suddenly and with no explanation.”
Little recourse
Chen said his family’s attempts to complain had met with stonewalling. “They sent a couple of people to talk to us, but they just said the same thing over and over; it’s always the same,” he said.
“He told us we could sue if we wanted but they didn’t care where we took it; they weren’t worried.”
He said local people had scant recourse to the court system.
“They are all in cahoots, so it’s just as useless filing a lawsuit with them,” Chen said. “The courts wouldn’t accept the case.”
He said the family was still shocked and angry by the loss of the remains.
“The government talks about a harmonious society, but how is this harmonious?” he said.
A second local resident, also surnamed Chen, said around four or five households in the same village had lost family grave sites to the bulldozers.
“That’s right, this did happen, and some of the family members were opposed to the demolitions [of the grave sites],” he said.
Family grave sites
In July 2010, residents of Shidong township in the southern province of Guangdong clashed with police as they tried to prevent the demolition of ancestral burial sites.
Often visited at festivals during the Chinese lunar calendar, family grave sites form an important part of ancestor rituals linked to Confucian values of filial piety and represent strong ties to the ancestral homeland sometimes dating back centuries.
Similar disputes have flared in other parts of China, with villagers voicing angry complaints at government interference in an age-old custom, which requires bodily integrity for transition to the next world.
China’s countryside has seen a wave of bitter land disputes in recent years between farming communities and local officials keen to cash in on skyrocketing property values.
Reported by Yang Fan for RFA’s Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
