On Grave Relocation in Contemporary China
by THOMAS S. MULLANEY
We are proud to present an excerpt from our newest Stanford Digital Project, The Chinese Deathscape.
In the summer of 2007, I found myself in the backseat of an airport taxi just outside the city of Dunhuang in northwest China. Looking out of the car window at an expanse of desert terrain, I noticed small, chalk-white posts in the distance. “What are those?” I asked the taxi driver. “Those are graves,” he explained, looking out of the driver-side window. Silence resumed. A few moments passed, and he continued. “They used to be over there.” His arm was outstretched, this time gesturing toward the passenger side of the vehicle. The graves, he explained, had been moved from one side of the highway to the other.
Arriving at my destination, I disembarked and set about my day. This passing exchange stayed with me, however, for the remainder of the visit and beyond. Why were these graves moved? What involvement did the families of the deceased have in this process? How did they feel about it? Where else in China was this happening? At what scale? How does one move a grave?
These and many other questions have taken nearly ten years to answer, drawing me into a history that extends far beyond any one locale in China. Indeed, the scale of this history proved shocking to me, in terms of its sheer scope and intensity: With at least ten million graves exhumed over the past decade alone, China’s grave relocation campaign dwarfs in size and scope any known grave relocation effort, past or present, in the rest of the world. In the process, it has touched the lives of millions of families across the country and across the global diaspora.[1]
To grasp the immensity of Chinese grave relocation is no simple feat. At one end of the spectrum, a number of highly visible relocation initiatives account for tens and hundreds of thousands of exhumed graves each. Because of the controversies they engendered, these relocations are relatively well documented in the Chinese press. At the other end of the spectrum, some smaller-scale relocations have sparked major controversies as well, even though they involved the exhumation of sometimes only a single corpse. Between these two, well-documented extremes, however, resides a vast array of sparsely documented relocation initiatives—thousands of county-, township-, and village-level initiatives that, while surfacing only rarely in Chinese media, account for the majority of the millions of corpses that have been relocated in China during the contemporary period.