China’s red hot property market spreads to the cemetery

Skyrocketing property prices in China have spread to the grave as the same rampant speculation in the country’s housing market now haunts its packed cemeteries, Straits Times Indonesia has reported.

Grave plots at cemeteries with good feng shui located close to a town can now cost up to 20,000 yuan (US$3,056), three times more than 10 years ago, and many are competing to buy the limited graveyard space in big cities like Guangzhou.
As affluence has grown and the timeless respect of tradition for burying one’s dead lives on, cemetery owners and agents have found ways to maximize profits. Only ashes, not bodies, are buried in China because of space constraints, but tombs are now being partitioned to make room for more urns. Maintenance fees for the urns have skyrocketed as well, and some are hoarding cemetery land.

The business is so profitable that some residential property agents are moonlighting in the graveyard business and selling space in cemeteries at night, the Guangzhou Daily reported recently.

“I helped a speculator sell a cemetery space recently for over 300,000 yuan (US$45,847), and earned 10,000 yuan (US$1,528) in commission,” one agent named Xiao Zeng told the newspaper.
The profiteering mirrors what is happening in the overheated housing market, prompting a common lament across China: “Nowadays, you can’t afford to live, and you can’t afford to die.”

The current sky-high prices of burial grounds are unacceptable, said 90 percent of 10,000 respondents to an online survey released last week. All respondents said they would be willing to buy such costly graves only for their parents, but not for themselves. 

In Beijing and Guangzhou, where the average per sq m price of a burial plot now exceeds that of houses, some Chinese call themselves fen nu (grave slaves). This label is derived from fang nu (housing slaves) – those burdened with huge housing mortgages.
This year, Beijing’s policies to clamp down on speculation and build new subsidised housing for lower-income Chinese have helped to cool the housing market a little. Now, some are calling for similar measures to be applied to the cemetery market.

“The government should take the responsibility to provide cemeteries for the public good, increasing investment and lowering the [price] threshold,” said Shandong University’s Professor Wang Zhongwu.