People dressed in traditional Chinese costume participate in a Qingming Festival ceremony in Sichuan Province, on April 5, 2023. Photo: IC

Several Chinese inland cities will organize group sea burials in April and May with the service fees covered by local civil affairs authorities to promote green burial practices, which take less farmland and resources and are friendly to the environment.

Hohhot in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region will hold a collective burial ceremony from May 9 to May 10 at the sea area near the coastal city of Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province, according to a government notice. 

Hohhot's civil affairs bureau said that the ceremony is open, and people in Hohhot's registered households and their relatives will only need to pay for transportation and accommodation, as the bureau will cover all expenses related to the sea burial service.

"We have coordinated the details of our trip with the department in charge of sea burials under the Qingdao Funeral Service Center and more than 50 families applied, as the application deadline is April 30," a staffer at the Hohhot civil affairs bureau told the Global Times on Sunday. 

Northwest China's Shaanxi Province will also hold its first group sea burial ceremony in Qingdao at the end of April. Residents of the provincial capital Xi'an don't have to pay the service fee and can receive 5,000 yuan (roughly $725) as a subsidy, while residents from other regions in Shaanxi can apply for subsidies from their local civil service authorities.

The city of Jinan in Shandong had sea burials for 91 deceased residents on Thursday. Coastal cities including Qingdao, Fuzhou in East China's Fujian Province and Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning Province provide free and regular sea burial services for local residents, with cash subsidies to encourage eco-friendly burial practices.

Experts said that China has advocated and promoted green burials for many years such as sea burials, tree burials, grassland burials and wall burials to save land and resources and protect the environment by using less non-degradable stone materials. China may see a constant death increase due to its aging population.

Guiding more people to choose green funerals means less farmland will be occupied by traditional burials, which can help hold the country's farmland area above the red line of 1.8 billion mu (about 120 million hectares), Peng Xizhe, director of the Fudan University Center for Population and Development Policy Studies, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Peng said that green burial practices are not easy for some Chinese people to accept as they don't comply with some traditional funeral customs. "For example, many people have a strong need to worship at graves, but how could they do so if they scatter their relatives' ashes into the sea?"

Peng suggested advocating green funerals and providing the public with both traditional and non-traditional ones so that they can freely choose the one they prefer. "We need to keep a balance between respecting traditional Chinese culture and saving land and resources," Peng said. 

The Chinese mainland recorded 10.41 million deaths in 2022. The population aged above 60 accounted for 18.9 percent at the end of 2021 and the rate is estimated to surpass 30 around 2035, according to the National Health Commission.