No Coffin Bangers in China

The NYT ran a piece today about China's ban on burials. Excerpts:

The suppression of coffin sales and the requirement that the dead must be cremated instead of buried began soon after the Communist takeover in 1949; it was aimed in part at preventing ostentatious funerals and preserving land for other uses.

Pre-Communist society in China put such an emphasis on funerals that families spent up to three years actively mourning a death and sometimes even sold daughters to pay for elaborate temple rituals commemorating an elder member, according to Ho Pui-yin, a historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. . .

[A few] coffins are for sale only to people living far from cities. Beijing authorities loosened the national ban on burials slightly in 1985 to allow burials and coffin sales just for residents of the most remote, least populated and most inaccessible areas.

The harvest of cedars around here is strictly controlled because deforestation of mountain slopes may have contributed to the 1996 flood. Only trees less than 100 years old may be cut, and the regulated harvest is allocated to the local furniture industry, officials said.

I realize that the Communist ban on burials was motivated at least partly by practical concerns: "Where do we put all the bodies?" But it was also an attempt to get rid of death as a lived experience. That strikes me as significant. I suspect it was part of the Communist attempt to eradicate God from society. The contemplation of death, after all, has long been a spur to virtue and contemplation of God. It's present in Plato's works, and a person can't read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations without being struck by his sober approach to this ephemeral life. Christians have long recognized that the contemplation of death is a proper antidote to excess materalism and worldliness (see this post), though I've struggled with whether the picture of a corpse in his coffin that Russian saint Tikhon of Zadonsk kept in his room is a bit too morbid.