cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46319830
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46319779
Protests have erupted among villagers in southwest China against a government order on burial practices, an exceedingly rare expression of dissent in a country with little tolerance for it.
The poor and rural province of Guizhou, about 2,000km from Beijing, has witnessed a string of rare protests since the weekend after the local government imposed a mandatory cremation policy.
The protests reportedly continued on Tuesday as the government pushed back with a notice, which claimed that cremation was necessary to preserve land resources and promote a “frugal new funeral style”.
[...]
A compilation of videos shared by the X account Yesterday Big Cat showed people purportedly gathering around government officials and chanting slogans in a rare display of dissent. A villager can be heard shouting: “If the Communist Party is digging up ancestor’s graves, go dig up Xi Jinping’s ancestral tombs first.”
Protests are an unusual sight in China, and their coverage in local media is even sparse. Beijing’s reaction to the protests over the years has been censorship and an attempt to crack down.
The China Dissent Monitor this year recorded 661 rural protests in the country, a 70 per cent increase over the whole of 2024,
[...]
China has imposed sweeping funeral reforms to phase out ground burials and encouraged people to consider alternative funeral practices, even sea burials. But the orders have invited backlash from mostly rural communities who see traditional burials are part of their culture.
[...]
In 2021, Chinese authorities faced backlash for exhuming the body of an elderly woman for cremation after her son had given her a traditional burial in Guizhou.
A villager from Pingtang county rued that his mother's body was removed from her grave and sent to a funeral home soon after her family had buried her. “I’m OK if they took her away from home, but why did they dig her up after we buried her," he was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.
Oh, absolutely, World News is filled with people praising the west for cracking down on protests, they're clearly very pro-government.
/s and fuck off with your nonsense. This place is incredibly critical of basically every decision a major government makes.