This article analyzes changes associated with the governance of death in Shanghai under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the first half of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Although the PRC was established in 1949, I am especially concerned with the period between 1953, when the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau took over the Funeral and Interment Management Office (called the Funeral Office hereafter), and 1966, when the Cultural Revolution campaign (1966–69) began. I discuss three specific historical events here: the nationalization of funeral institutions, the promotion of cremation, and the development of agriculture and animal husbandry as the Shanghai funeral industry's sideline businesses.
The first event, the nationalization of funeral institutions, was a small part of a nationwide process that was taken up after the CCP took over China from the Nationalists (also known as the Guomindang or GMD). In order to establish its proletarian regime, the CCP decided to nationalize privately owned companies first. The CCP's political jargon described this process as a “socialist transformation.” Implementing such a socialist transformation in all aspects of life became an overwhelming movement that swept, albeit unevenly, across China after the CCP's initial takeover. The funeral industry was just one of many industries that were nationalized at that time.
The promotion of cremation was a policy inherited from the GMD, even though the GMD government never successfully promoted it in the governance of death. Both the GMD and the CCP believed that cremation was the “modern” way to dispose of human remains. This stood in stark contrast with the usual (and only proper) Han Chinese cultural practice of body burial—the key to ancestor worship and thus to Confucian ethics such as filial piety (Ahern Reference Ahern1973; Ikels Reference Ikels and Ikels2004; Oxfeld Reference Oxfeld2010). Finally, the last event, the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry as seemingly odd sideline businesses for funeral homes and cemeteries, resulted from officials’ attempts to transform the believed unproductive and wasteful nature of the funeral industry into literal productivity. Increasing productivity, whether in agriculture or other economic sectors, has been one of the key goals of the CCP in governing China and remains so today, despite the fact that some such government efforts to increase productivity effectively caused widespread starvation.
The degree to which each of these three events was implemented varied. The first policy was implemented the most thoroughly; the second tended to fluctuate but eventually was implemented fully in Shanghai when the Cultural Revolution campaign began; and the third was primarily executed around the time of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). All the primary data cited and analyzed in this article are from government documents stored in a Shanghai funeral parlor. I accidently encountered these original sources when conducting anthropological fieldwork in funeral parlors in Shanghai in 2010 and 2011. While the stories recorded in these documents are very intriguing and not well known, and therefore worthy of documentation, the primary goal of this article is to engage anthropological analysis on dead body management.
In anthropology, death has long been a staple of scholarly work. However, interest in death had gone dormant until relatively recently. The emergence of a new group of scholars who were interested in dead body management resurrected the study of death. Katherine Verdery's book The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (Reference Verdery1999) was a pioneering work. In this thought-provoking study, Verdery proposes the concept of dead body politics by showing how symbolic values construct the afterlife of dead bodies. Meanwhile, some anthropologists started to work on the practicalities of dead body management in this recent revival of death study. A key book in this vein is anthropologist Hikaru Suzuki's work The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan (Reference Suzuki2000). Suzuki specifically draws our attention to the role of professional organizations as well as the actual funeral professionals who work there—an aspect that previous scholars working on death had not yet touched in depth. My own work builds on Verdery's theoretical insight to explore the politics of dead bodies and on Suzuki's ethnographic concerns about the practicality of managing dead bodies. Specifically, I examine the politics of governing funeral institutions and of the interactions between funeral professionals and the bereaved during the implementation of specific policies governing dead bodies under the CCP.
In Sinophone studies, scholarly interest in death perhaps reached a climax with the publication of the seminal edited volume Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Watson and Rawski Reference Watson and Rawski1988). Since then, interest in death had been dormant until recently. Among the more recent works on death in China, the most relevant have focused on Funeral and Interment Reforms (binzang gaige) (hereafter, “Funeral Reform”). Initiated during the Republican era, Funeral Reform asked people to give up “processions, meat offerings, tablets (central to ancestor worship, and replaced with photographs), banquets, Buddhist and Taoist salvation rituals, and most other aspects of death rituals” (Goossaert and Palmer Reference Goossaert and Palmer2011, 228). These rituals had long been associated with existing body burial practices and had been quite standardized since late imperial China (Rawski Reference Rawski, Watson and Rawski1988; Watson Reference Watson, Watson and Rawski1988). Both the GMD and the CCP promoted Funeral Reform because they saw these body burial practices as “wasteful,” “superstitious” (as they were based on ideas of spirits and the afterlife), and “feudalist” (since they maintained Confucian hierarchies).
Two key monographs deal with Funeral Reform in China. The first is Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer's book The Religious Question in Modern China (2011), which includes one chapter specifically exploring Funeral and Interment Reform. Goossaert and Palmer do so by situating Funeral Reform within the larger religious landscape of Chinese societies in modern China. While the elimination of rituals centered around dead bodies is an essential part of understanding Funeral Reform, as I analyze in this article, the nationalization of funeral institutions and the development of agricultural sideline industries in the Shanghai funeral industry were also integral parts of a larger Funeral Reform effort. Both provided the Shanghai government the means for exerting more control over dead bodies and the rituals associated with them. However, scholars focusing on religious change have tended to overlook these wider economic aspects of Funeral Reform.
Christian Henriot's work Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai (2016) provides an extremely detailed account of funeral governance in Shanghai, primarily during the Republican era with some coverage of the early period of the PRC. From the measurement of death and dead bodies, of services provided by civic organizations (such as guilds and charities) and private companies, and of cemetery and cremation rates, this impressive book investigates the economics of dead body management. It lays the groundwork for anyone who works on death in China in general and in Shanghai in particular. My own work echoes Henriot's emphasis on the infrastructure of dead body management: the civic associations and private companies that played crucial roles in managing dead bodies. However, rather than focusing on the economics of dead body management by taking a wide-angle view of the changes in dead body managing facilities, I instead interpret anecdotes and fragments to pull through personal and particular narrative threads about changes happening in the political lives of dead bodies.
My analysis also reorients our understanding of dead body management in general and of Funeral Reform in particular toward the doing aspects of these policies when examining the political lives of dead bodies. Although the works mentioned earlier discuss Funeral Reform, we know very little about how these policies were implemented on the ground and in actual practice. I document and analyze how low-ranking quasi-governmental officials—state funeral practitioners—interacted with Shanghai people in their quotidian encounters inside funeral parlors (all of which were state owned beginning in the early 1950s). Rebecca Nedostup (Reference Nedostup2017) follows this line of exploration in her effort to simultaneously trace the displacement of living and dead bodies during the Long War in China (1937–59). By focusing on the practicalities of managing both the living who were socially dead and dead bodies who were biologically dead, Nedostup shows how we might understand the political afterlives of dead bodies in terms of this doing aspect.
My ultimate goal in providing an alternative framework for analyzing Funeral Reform (and an alternative to the religious change and the economic frameworks) is to show how the CCP's Funeral Reform was aimed not only at “modernizing” funeral rituals with a new economic rationality but also at (re)shaping the perception of citizenship at the end of life. Death and its related concepts of lineage, ancestor worship, and spirits have long been a key site for understanding the ideas of self and persons in Sinophone studies. It is in this context that we can understand why Goossaert and Palmer (Reference Goossaert and Palmer2011, 227) describe Funeral Reform as “one of the most salient aspects of the modern state's intervention in private religious practice so as to redirect filial piety from the limited circle of kin to the larger nation.” While Nationalists started promoting Funeral and Interment Reform under the regime of hygiene, a concept especially associated with Republican era modernism (Rogaski Reference Rogaski2014), the privileging of a hygiene-based governing rationale in death was a practical decision given the vast accumulations of corpses all over the city by the time the CCP took over Shanghai in 1949 (Henriot Reference Henriot2016). While the Health Bureau and its concern for hygiene solved the immediate problem of dumping bodies on the streets, there was no way to change the root issue without putting into effect a more fundamental transformation that changed how people handled death and dead bodies.
My exanimation of the three policies described at the beginning of this article shows that when the Shanghai Funeral Office shifted from being in the hands of the Health Bureau to the Civil Affairs Bureau in 1953, we started to see the emergence of what I call the “civil governance of death.” Under the civil governance of death, the state attempted to govern death not only as it concerned hygiene but also as a means of shaping ideas of citizenship. Briefly speaking for now, in a discussion of the nationalization of funeral institutions in Shanghai, I show how the Chinese state attempted to eliminate alternative sources of identity that an individual might have (alternative, that is, to the socialist state). This included cosmopolitan, associational, and religious aspects of being a person that were prevalent in the handling of death and dead bodies at that time. Furthermore, by analyzing how state funeral parlors promoted cremation, I show how quasi civil servants who worked at state funeral parlors tried to alienate individuals (in fact, both the living and the dead) from their kinship networks. This aimed to diminish the significance of relational ideas of self. Finally, by tackling funeral parlors’ efforts at developing animal husbandry and agriculture as the Shanghai funeral industry's sideline businesses—turning plots of unused land into useful sites of production—I show how the state sought to transform everyone into (their imagination of) productive workers.
Each of these steps was directed toward constructing a particular kind of socialist citizen. By forcing the living to reconceptualize themselves, the dead, and the relationships between the living and the dead through managing the boundaries between civic and kin groups within China and between humans and spirits, the civil governance of death aimed to create political subjects who were directly linked to the socialist state. By transforming the living's sense of self and the relationship between the living and the dead from being persons embedded in various social relations to being citizens of a nation-state, Funeral Reform aimed to construct new kinds of citizens at the end of life. While redirecting filial piety from the limited circle of kin to the larger nation was also an important part of Funeral Reform when the Shanghai Funeral Office was in the hands of the Health Bureau, it never emerged to function as a goal of its own.
Ruth Toulson (Reference Toulson, Chua, Cook, Long and Wilson2012) has done something similar in her article exploring how the Lees in Singapore had to exhume their ancestors for a state housing development project. As the events and narratives about body exhumation unfold, Toulson vividly shows how burial sites are key locations where Singaporean identities are negotiated. As Toulson argues, it is through death that ordinary Singaporeans imagine the power of the state. This article echoes Toulson's line of argument as we both explore how the state (both authoritarian states no less) shape the concept of citizenship vis-á-vis the dead. By empirically examining how Shanghai funeral parlors implemented particular policies and discussed the initial results of funeral policy implementation along the way, my analysis shows how the Shanghai state took death as a productive site where different ideas of persons, whether they be about kin groups, places of origin, or nation-states (perhaps especially about nation-states), were contested in their construction of new socialist citizens.
Nationalizing Funeral Institutions in Shanghai
The nationalization of funeral institutions involved more than a change of property ownership. It was also a part of a deliberate move to break non-Party ties and alternative sources of identity. There were two common types of ownership for funeral institutions in the 1940s: foreign and Chinese capital. Some were also affiliated with religious organizations and some were not. These institutional variables affected the trajectories and intensity of the nationalization of private property. Most importantly, they revealed three sources of identity that were available and important to many Shanghai residents at the time: foreign influences, associational life and other intermediary loyalties, and religion. In the following sections, I discuss how the Funeral Office nationalized funeral homes owned by foreign capital, Chinese native place associations, and Chinese religious organizations, respectively. I recount a key example of each to illustrate how the nationalization project intended to erase intermediate sources of identity between individuals and the socialist state.
The State's Attempts to Eliminate External and Internal Others
To begin with, the story of Wanguo Funeral Home is filled with “Shanghai characteristics”—it being a treaty port city with several foreign concessions.Footnote 1 For most Chinese who did not live in 1930s Shanghai, the name Wanguo Funeral Home might have been unfamiliar. Yet even many non-Shanghai contemporaries probably would have heard of the funeral of Ruan Lingyu, then most famous Chinese silent movie star, who committed suicide in 1935 at the age of twenty-five. Wanguo handled her funeral. Her funeral procession “was three miles long, three women committed suicide during it, and the New York Times ran a front-page story, calling it ‘the most spectacular funeral of the century’” (Cousins Reference Cousins2004). About a year later, one of the most important contemporary Chinese writers (one of the few claimed by both the CCP and the GMD), Lu Xun, died in Shanghai. Again it was Wanguo Funeral Home that handled his funeral.
Wanguo was the first “funeral home” (binyiguan) in China. Its story began when a funeral home in New York sent two people, the director's son and one employee named R. O. Scott, to Shanghai in 1924. They started the China Casket Company there and named their funeral home the “International Funeral Home” in English and “Wanguo,” meaning ten thousand countries, in Chinese. This company originally served only foreigners. When business did not prosper as much as the owners had hoped, they extended service to Chinese. However, few Chinese residents used Wanguo's services, at least partly because the operation completely followed the current Euro-American funeral styles.
In 1934, following the Japanese hostilities of 1932, the company in New York decided to close the funeral home, and R. O. Scott took the opportunity to buy it from his former employer. After buying Wanguo, he shifted his target customers from foreigners to rich Shanghai businessmen, celebrities, intellectuals, and artists. With this switch, he also allowed many Chinese ways of operating funerals to intermingle with Western styles at Wanguo. Only a year after he took it over, the movie star Ruan Lingyu's funeral made Wanguo a household name in Shanghai overnight. As Wanguo's business flourished, many Chinese imitated it and many funeral homes, such as the China Funeral Home, the Centre Funeral Home, and the Shanghai Funeral Home among others suddenly began to spring up in Shanghai.
During China's extended engagement in what would become World War II, the Japanese occupying authorities took over Wanguo and transferred it to state ownership. When that war finished, however, the GMD returned Wanguo to its owner, Scott. By 1949, when the CCP took over Shanghai, Scott had decided to return to America. He asked a Chinese man named Dong Shoupeng to continue to run the funeral home for him. On September 8, 1951, the Health Bureau submitted a request to the CCP authorities governing Shanghai to take over Wanguo. This first request, however, did not receive approval. On May 29, 1953, when the Civil Affairs Bureau wrote to the Health Bureau to discuss its impending takeover of the administrative functions of the Funeral Office, it also raised once again the issue of taking over Wanguo from its private foreign owner. In this document, the Civil Affairs Bureau suggested that, considering the excellent quality of the funeral home's equipment and the profit it generated, the Civil Affairs Bureau should continue to run Wanguo after the state takeover.
On December 7, 1953, the Shanghai Military Control Committee, the highest administrative authority at that time, ordered the Civil Affairs Bureau to take over Wanguo. In this order, it said that the owner should turn over all property belonging to this funeral home to the state without sabotaging, transferring, or hiding any of it. All workers were to be retained, to continue to work as usual. Two days later, the vice chair of the Civil Affairs Bureau had a meeting with Dong Shoupeng to inform him of the takeover. Later that same day, the head of the Social Unit (the Funeral Office was below this unit within the Civil Affairs Bureau hierarchy), Fan Yuling, and five other people accompanied Dong Shoupeng back to Wanguo. As soon as they entered the funeral home, they called a meeting to tell all the employees about the takeover and to reassure them of their future job security, in order to “relieve” the workers’ fears about their uncertain future. From the announcement of the official order to the actual takeover, it took the Civil Affairs Bureau only two days to nationalize Wanguo. In the same month, the bilingual sign outside Wanguo was changed to read (now only in Chinese) “Municipal No. 1 Funeral Home” (shili diyi binyiguan). The foreign private capital funded funeral home had now officially become a Chinese public funeral home.
As a cultural contact zone, Wanguo not only transmitted Euro-American cultural influence but also represented the colonial invasion that had made its existence possible in the first place. Wanguo thus symbolically and materially represented an “external other” that simultaneously stood for both cosmopolitan foreignness and colonial humiliation in the context of Shanghai, in the eyes of the state at least. Therefore, by transferring this foreign cultural capital to the socialist state, the nationalization of Wanguo was meant to expel foreign influences as sources of cosmopolitan identity and to eliminate reminders of colonial shame. A good illustration of this is the CCP's choice of name—the funeral home went from being “ten thousand countries” (wanguo), which showed its grand global lineage, to the Municipal No. 1 Funeral Home, a name that emphasized its administrative status in relation to the beginning of the Communist period and to the municipality (shili, meaning at the municipal level). Consequently, the CCP's effort to nationalize this foreign capital funeral home was not just based on some sort of pan-Communist pursuit of collective property. Rather, it was also about the CCP's desire to eliminate a key source for enacting a cosmopolitan self in death and to create a new Chinese self by determining who could own institutions that manage dead bodies.
The second story, the story of Xijin Funeral Home, is much simpler. Xijin Funeral Home, like many other Chinese funeral homes in Shanghai, was associated with the Xijin Association—a native place association. Native place represented one of the most important ways of identifying what being a person meant in pre-Communist Shanghai and in the period immediately after the regime change. The association was first established in 1902 for people who came to Shanghai from Wuxi and Jinkui cities. Just a few years before Wanguo Funeral Home began to flourish, the Xijin Association's coffin repository already contained several funeral halls and a funeral service department. These funeral halls and the service department were the predecessors of the Xijin Funeral Home.
The traditional Chinese idea of a proper death was to be buried in one's hometown, like “falling leaves returning to their roots” (luoye guigen). In contrast to Euro-American conceptions of “urbanites,” imperial Chinese urban life was viewed as temporary and most residents thought that they would return to be buried in the area they had grown up in, or “native place,” with their ancestors—the sojourning aspects of imperial Chinese cities described by Skinner (Reference Skinner and Skinner1977, 539). Pre-communist Shanghai was no exception. Since native place was one of the most important sources of identity for individuals and given the need to return in death to one's ancestral home, coffin repositories were often facilities attached to native place associations or association-based guilds (Sinn Reference Sinn2003). When they had enough coffins to fill up a boat, the coffins would be transported back to the hometown. For poor people, native place associations provided charity cemetery plots in Shanghai so that the poor could at least be partially returned to their hometown by being buried on their hometown association's property (Bergère Reference Bergère2009, 101).
Over the first forty years of Xijin's operation, service gradually expanded from providing only for people who came to Shanghai from the same area of origin to providing for-profit services to the general public. In 1954, the Civil Affairs Bureau and the Shanghai branch of the People's Relief Administration of China (renmin jiuji zonghui) decided that all forms of native place associations established with social funds counted as public property and therefore needed to be “returned” to the state. This was not seen as a change from private to state ownership. Rather, the properties were viewed as already “public” in the first place. They were public entities that were improperly held for the benefit of a small proportion of the public and therefore should be made fully public. In July 1954, the Civil Affairs Bureau formed a four-person team to take over Xijin. The Bureau officially finalized its takeover on November 13, 1954. Since there were few funeral homes in downtown Shanghai by then, the Bureau decided to make Xijin into a city funeral home. In March 1955, the Xijin Funeral Home was renamed the Shanghai Municipal Xijin Funeral Home.
While institutions of foreign capital such as Wanguo represented (the invasion of) the external other, funeral institutions belonging to Chinese native place associations and institutions of Chinese capital represented a type of “internal other” that united and divided people into different groups. Identity markers such as native place created community boundaries in urban Shanghai, where practically everyone was an immigrant. These institutional affiliations mediated, crosscut, and even overshadowed the connections between the individual and the state. They were therefore prime targets to be redefined and “nationalized.” While actual felt emotional belonging and regional identities were more resilient, these regionally divided public differences in the ownership of dead body managing infrastructure were eradicated as the Funeral Office took over the funeral institutions of native place associations, disbanded them, and redistributed their property and employees into state enterprises. While there was no need to erase the particular history of Xijin in the public imagination of proper new Chinese citizens, as had occurred at Wanguo, the funeral home's new name emphasized that it now “belonged” to the municipality. Being a part of Xijin was fine as long as people recognized that the Chinese socialist state was the first and foremost object of identification.
The State's Attempts to Eliminate Religious Affiliation within the Funeral Industry
Foreign and private capital were not the only indications of the potentiality and multiplicity of thinking about what being a person meant in China in general and in Shanghai in particular just after the revolution. Another important object of identification was religion, broadly defined. While the nationalization of private and commercial cemeteries, funeral homes, and coffin repositories went relatively smoothly, the nationalization of religiously affiliated funeral institutions created more issues. The former were nationalized within a couple of months, whereas the latter took almost ten years. The crucial factor was that religious funeral institutions were caught between two bureaus. One was the Civil Affairs Bureau, which by then had been placed in charge of all funeral-related business. The other was the Religious Affairs Bureau, which was in charge of all religious institutions. In this section, I discuss the story of Haihui Temple (haihuisi) in depth to give a sense of the complicated texture of the Chinese state at that time, even in terms of “nationalization.”
In 1949, the sutra-chanting business was not going well at Haihui Temple. In order to gain additional income, the head monk, Huikai, obtained money from some fellow Buddhists to start the Haihui Temple Crematorium and registered it with the Business Administration Bureau as a company serving the general public. It officially started its business in January 1950. In addition to the seven monks assigned by Huikai to work there, Haihui Temple Crematorium hired around twenty other workers. Although Haihui Temple and the crematorium were adjacent to each other, their finances, space (including land and houses), and personnel were separate. Their business, however, was still not flourishing, as most Shanghai people tended to reject cremation so long as they could afford a burial.
When the nationalization process started in 1956, the Shanghai Religious Affairs Bureau, in response to a Civil Affairs Bureau inquiry (i.e., cross-bureau pressure), said that Haihui Temple Crematorium was a business by its nature and therefore should be included in the nationalization project. As explained by the Religious Affairs Bureau, the problems only grew from there:
Over the course of the nationalizing process, though, Comrade Zhu Jinfu, who was sent by the Funeral Office to run the crematorium, seriously violated religious policies. He attempted to convert the Grand Hall [of Haihui Temple] into a mourning hall. He also forced monks to stop being monks (huansu). Some monks refused, yet they were told that the minority must obey the majority's decision. In the end of July 1956, the head of the sales department, Gu Jinshen[,] called a meeting with nine monks. Comrade Gu told them in the form of an administrative order that there would be no Buddhist ceremonies [in the crematorium] and all religious activities were to be terminated in the temple. Those monks who did not want to return to the lay life soon came to our bureau [the Religious Affairs Bureau], the Religious Affairs Department of the Luwan District Government, and Shanghai Buddhist Association. Our bureau and the [Luwan] Religious Affairs Department soon contacted Comrade Mao, the Division head of the Civil Affairs Bureau, Comrade Shu, the head of the Funeral Office, and the representative Comrade Gu. We told them that they should not touch the Grand Hall. After several attempts at negotiations, although the Grand Hall was intact, they locked it up and suspended its usage. The above series of examples of violations of [the government's] religious policies caused unhappiness to many Buddhists and to such an extent that they mistakenly thought that the state had nationalized the Haihui Temple.Footnote 2
Here, the Religious Affairs Bureau stepped in to halt the nationalizing actions taken by the Civil Affairs Bureau because they conflicted with the government's religious policies, which were, strictly speaking, the purview of the Religious Affairs Bureau. The two bureaus eventually sat down to negotiate and finally decided on a two-step plan. The first step was to make Haihui Temple Crematorium a privately run company as a sideline business of the temple. The temple would be subordinated to the Buddhist Association of China (which was itself subordinated to the Religious Affairs Bureau). The Civil Affairs Bureau would assist with the cremation business and the education of the workers in the crematorium. If this failed, the second step would be to separate the temple and the crematorium, with the Buddhist Association supervising the former and the Funeral Office taking over the later.
However, the Religious Affairs Bureau later complained that the Funeral Office had not only failed to use the correct ideology (sixiang gongzuo) to educate the workers in the crematorium, but also told the workers who wanted to be nationalized that there was nothing it could do and that their supervisor was the Buddhist Association, not the Funeral Office. From the Religious Affairs Bureau's perspective, this was an attempt to work against the existing agreement by suggesting that the problem lay in the workers’ location within the Religious Affairs Bureau rather than with the Civil Affairs Bureau. The tension between the monks (backed by the Religious Bureau) and the crematorium workers (backed by the Civil Affairs Bureau) worsened over the next few months as a result of a continuing degeneration in the business of the crematorium. Things got so bad that the crematorium workers blamed the monks, who refused to return to a lay life, for the fact that the crematorium was had not been nationalized (and ultimately not doing well). As a result,
Five families of the [crematorium] workers, led by Gu Jinshen, moved into the crematorium (despite having their own houses in Shanghai and some originally living in the countryside). After they moved in, they went as far as to hang women's underwear in front of the Grand Hall. This disturbed and upset the monks very much.
Forcing monks who had taken vows of abstinence to be exposed to women's underwear was clearly provocative and, as intended, upset the monks greatly. The monks then made a formal request to the Religious Affairs Bureau to resolve the situation. When the Religious Affairs Bureau passed on the monks’ complaints to the Civil Affairs Bureau, the latter claimed that it did not own the property of the crematorium, so it could not deal with the issue. The Religious Affairs Bureau finally relented and requested that the Shanghai CCP Committee approve the separation of the temple and the crematorium.
The decision continued to go back and forth at the top levels, however, presumably as other political issues and policies changed. The Shanghai CCP Committee approved the Civil Affairs Bureau's request, submitted on August 22, 1960, to nationalize Haihui Temple Crematorium and other religious cemeteries on December 3, 1960. However, it seems that on May 18, 1961, this issue went back to the negotiating table. On June 11, 1961, the Shanghai CCP Committee approved a motion to suspend the Civil Affairs Bureau's nationalization of religious funeral institutions. The issue was finally resolved at the end of 1965 on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. It was at this time that Haihui Temple Crematorium, along with Shanghai's other religious cemeteries, was finally nationalized by the Civil Affairs Bureau for good.
This vignette shows the complicated process that was necessary to eliminate religious institutions in the management of dead bodies. The intra-bureau competition provided space for monks and crematorium workers to fight (through their respective vertical backers) for their own interests, even in the midst of a seemingly overwhelming project of nationalization. Religious associations stood for transcendental and alternative sources of power that regulated relationships and between humans and the larger cosmological world. Such characteristics gave religious associations the potential to compete with the Party for group loyalty, on the one hand, and clearly linked them to “feudalism” and “superstition,” on the other. Yet, at the same time, the CCP's constitution legally allowed “religion.” Even though the state's definition of religion referred to institutional religions (subject to the party-state) instead of diffused religions (Yang Reference Yang1961), state recognition of religion nevertheless created ambiguity for religious funeral institutions. Were they funeral institutions (and therefore to be governed by the Civil Affairs Bureau), or were they religious institutions (and therefore to be governed by the Religious Affairs Bureau)? This uncertainty allowed inter-bureau politics to thrive and gave religious funeral institutions a much longer life span than any other funeral institution in the process of the so-called socialist transformation.
The prolonged process of nationalizing religious institutions shows how it was much harder for the state to erase religious affiliation compared with the state's attempts to eliminate cosmopolitan and native place-based identities because of the nature of dual authority in religious funeral institutions. While religious identity and religious institutions are two interrelated yet different things, changes in the ownership of religious institutions nonetheless provides a window to see how the state tried to eliminate religious ideas of self in the process of constructing socialist citizenship. Again, however, it is worth noting that my emphasis here is on how this occurred rather than the claim that the state had somehow effectively eliminated religious identity as it nationalized religious funeral institutions. This story shows how even the governing side of shaping citizenship is not necessarily a coherent, consistent, or homogenizing force, even though we often talk about the state as a unified entity. The civil governance of death and its intention to create political subjects had to be debated and negotiated on the governing side as well. As such, the potential for different ways of imagining citizen-subjects at the end of life existed at the boundary of dual bureaucratic authority.
Promoting Cremation in Shanghai
Prior to the CCP, cremation as a kind of disposal method for dead bodies had already existed for a long time among Han Chinese people. Although its exact origin is still debated, its occasional increase in popularity was linked to the popularization of Buddhism in China (Ebrey Reference Ebrey1990). Imperial Confucian scholar-officials, however, objected to and sought to criminalize cremation because it violated principles of filial piety. For a deceased parent to be a proper ancestor (and thus a proper postmortem person), Confucian scholar-officials believed, the deceased's body had to remain whole in death. After Shanghai became a treaty port, cremation again came to be associated with devout Buddhists or Buddhist monks, foreigners, and extremely poor Chinese (Xiang Reference Xiang1992). Under the early CCP, the need to dispose of deceased residents played a more important role than ideological reasons in kick-starting the on-the-ground promotion of cremation.
Despite the fact that promoting cremation became the Funeral Office's primary task in governing death after it became a part of the Civil Affairs Bureau, implementation was to be rather more cautious and pragmatic than passionate and revolutionary. This contrasted with the nationalization of funeral institutions, which was done rapidly through administrative orders. Specifically, the promotion of cremation emphasized campaigning through persuasion, or “carrying out thought work” (gao sixiang gongzuo), to use the vernacular term. Here I discuss the specific techniques used to persuade the bereaved to accept cremation in Shanghai. The actual technique of promoting cremation is important because, as I argue, this technique aimed to alienate individual mourners from their kin relations.
In the beginning, the methods of promoting cremation involved disseminating printed campaign materials throughout hospitals, police stations, alleys, neighborhood communities, charity organizations, and funeral parlors.Footnote 3 After 1955, the Funeral Office expanded its propaganda tools to include a slideshow promoting cremation that was shown in all movie theaters in Shanghai for a month, setting up giant billboards in landmark areas such as the Bund and the People's Avenue for a year, creating a “walkway” promoting cremation in the downtown district, and even inviting people to visit crematoria. In 1959, the Funeral Office even campaigned at the temple festivals of Qibao Temple, Longhua Temple, and Jing'an Temple. In 1964, during a new wave of this cremation campaign, the Transforming Customs and Promoting Cremation Committee not only campaigned in temple festivals as before but also turned the month of the Tomb Sweeping Festival (April) into a “Campaign for Cremation Month.” These examples not only show the resilience of religion even amid the civil governance of death but also the pragmatism of the Funeral Office in its efforts to promote cremation by utilizing folk cultural events.
While the foregoing methods were important in promoting state-sanctioned ideas about funeral and interment, this did not mean that people who did, in fact, need to arrange funerals at that time would accept these ideas. Therefore, within funeral homes, state funeral practitioners were tasked with persuading the bereaved of the superiority of cremation. In the funeral museum archive, I encountered some documents describing the actual process of persuading the bereaved to agree to cremate their loved one. State funeral practitioners wrote these documents as their work reports to their superiors. While such work reports were generally dramaticized for the purposes of this bureaucratic genre, they nonetheless give us a unique, though partial, look at how the persuasion was carried out on the ground. Below, I have transcribed parts of those reports.Footnote 4 What these descriptions show is how state practitioners persuaded the bereaved. As we will see, the key technique was to identify and isolate the chief mourners in their decision-making so that the state formed a direct bond (through state practitioners) with chief mourners that could transcend other relational and kinship relationships.
I: So Long as You Are Willing to Remain Firm, the Party and the Masses All Support You
The deceased lived with his wife and his parents. When they came to our funeral home to organize the funeral, over 20 people came (even though these people did not in general circumstances have any social interaction). The deceased's wife was thinking about cremating her husband, yet she had not fully made her mind up. This possibly open attitude, compared with the objections from the parents-in-law [parents of the deceased's wife] and other relatives, stood in stark contrast to the other people involved. The Comrades working in the memorial meeting halls were undeterred. On the one hand, Comrade Zhu Xifu went to invite the Public Security Bureau to assist [in their persuasion work]. On the other, Comrade Qiu Genchu and other comrades went to talk to the deceased's wife several times respectively. They analyzed the intentions of those relatives for her. They encouraged her to stick to the truth and stand her ground. They told her, “as long as you are willing to stand up, the Party and the masses all support you.” Then funeral practitioners went to talk to all those relatives together to explain the Party's policy and tell them that they [the relatives] had no right to stop other people's progress—they [the relatives] were politically criticized. Among these relatives, one woman was being particularly difficult. She kept trying to talk the wife out of her decision. So, we had an individual meeting with [this woman] to give her more pressure and remove her influence. As soon as we found one man among these relatives who seemed to change his mind a little, we took the opportunity of encouraging him to help us by doing an inside job from within in order to turn things around. After using this method several times, we managed to improve the situation.
II: Three Catches (san zhua): Catch the Organizer; Catch the Major Conflict; Catch the Thought
August 30. The deceased was Zhang Aidi. Female. 60 years old. Her husband Xu Jiji is a petty capitalist. Unemployed. He had planned to buy a coffin [meaning opting for burial]. He originally intended to have her funeral at his house. However, his lilong [neighborhood community] did not allow this [as it was supposed to have a very bad influence on the area] so he came to us. Xu Jiji insisted on transporting her body back home to be buried. His oldest son also insisted on this. After Comrade Kong learned more about the situation, he found out that the father favored his second son the most and therefore took more notice of what he said. When the second son came back from the army, Comrade Kong focused on persuading him [the second son], in order to persuade the father. Through memory contrasting methods (comparing how the second son treated his mother before and after he joined the army) and other persuasion, the father finally changed his attitude. He said, determinedly, “my good son, I will listen to you. I will certainly cremate your mother.” His other sons asked him to think seriously again. He said, “I certainly will do this. My mind is made up.” Finally, [the bereaved family] had one request—to bury her ashes nicely [meaning to still have a nice plot in the cemetery]. We agreed and helped them return the coffin. They were also very grateful.
III: Cooperate with the Lilong Closely
April 1. The deceased Wei Gendi. Female. 31 years old. Her husband Chen Pingling. Their three children and the mother-in-law of the husband [the deceased's mother] who came from Wuxi live together. Since the work unit carried out some “thought work” (sixiang gongzuo) with the husband in advance, he had already agreed to accept cremation. The main obstacle was the mother-in-law. She said to him, “if you cremate my daughter, I will not take care of these three children.” The husband was worried about this since he did not have parents to take care of his children. Comrade Hua Xingshen actively persuaded the mother-in-law (because they all came from Wuxi so sharing a language made persuasion easier). Comrade Hua used himself as an example. He said, ‘when my wife died, she was cremated.’ According to my understanding of what is happening over in Wuxi, there were many tombs that were dug up. If you buried your daughter, I'm afraid that it won't be too long before she is dug up as well. Then you'll have to spend more money to deal with it all over again. What trouble. I will not lie to you. If you agree to cremate your daughter, it will be good for your son-in-law [his work unit will have a very good impression of him]. After various persuasions and the cooperation of the work unit, the mother-in-law finally changed her mind. The childcare issue was solved.
As these instances show, persuading the bereaved to acquiesce to cremation was accomplished by making the chief mourner, whether the spouse or the children of the deceased, work directly with the state practitioners so that the state could distance them from the influence of their extended family. For example, the wife in the first story, the outsider of a patrilineal family yet “the partner” of the deceased within a nuclear family, was chosen to be the target for persuasion. The state practitioner working in the meeting hall was on the wife's side in fighting against the patrilineal family of the deceased in general and the parents of the deceased in particular. When this did not work, the state practitioner, Comrade Zhu Xifu, recruited people from the Public Security Bureau to persuade the patrilineal family of the deceased. Meanwhile, Comrade Qiu Genchu continued to talk to the wife to affirm her position by “analyzing the intentions of those relatives.” Although the report did not say what these intentions were, one reason that Qiu Genchu mentioned was probably related to how the deceased's patrilineal family made their decision: based on their lineage interests instead of the wife's interests. Thus, as the report says, “as long as you [the wife] are willing to stand up, the Party and the masses all support you [the wife].” Moreover, one particular woman who was asserting a “bad influence” from the state practitioners’ perspective and who was a moral upholder of extended family values was singled out. State practitioners had a separate and individual meeting with this woman to stop her from standing up for traditional values.
We see this strategy of choosing a target and using a “divide and conquer” technique in the second and third cases as well. In the second story, state practitioners persuaded the husband of the deceased by making the second son of the deceased persuade the father. This placed the father and second son in alliance against the other sons. In the third story, the state practitioners made sure that the widower was strong enough to resist his parents-in-law. This task was easier compared with the first one. After all, the first case was to persuade the wife to stand up against the patrilineal side. Meanwhile, the second was to support the husband to push back against the matrilineal side, which, however significant child care labor was to the husband, nonetheless occurred within a patriarchy. Although the general campaign might have had an impact on people's perceptions of cremation, cremation was more successfully promoted in the direct interaction between the bereaved and funeral practitioners working on the front lines of the funeral parlors. What made changes to cremation possible were these negotiations between the bereaved and the lowest rank of people within the hierarchy of funeral governance.
While families as a group have historically had rights and obligations in deciding how funerary rites and body disposal should be performed, it now became the specific individuals, backed by the state, who had the right and obligation to make such decisions. All three cases not only show the “divide and conquer” technique but also purposeful acts of atomizing individuals in making funeral decisions. This was done by state practitioners forcing (at least partially) a particular chief mourner to work with them and against other family members at the same time. As a result, if nationalization of funeral institutions was meant to remove associational ties (such as native place) or ties via religious belonging, campaigns promoting cremation aimed to remove individual ties to extended kin relations at the micro level. However, since nationalization depended on a more forceful top-down administrative order, while the promotion of cremation relied on persuasion, the latter gave the bereaved more space to negotiate with the state. This is not to mention that the way individuals responded to such governing attempts to eliminate religious and relational self is a different story entirely. The point is to show how the promotion of cremation was not just about changing the default way of handling corpses. It articulated, too, the state's desire to discourage relational ideas of person in order to construct citizen-subjects who were directly tied to the Party.
Turning Uselessness to Usefulness and Alienating the Dead
I have selected and translated the following quote from a document titled “Speech Notes from the Pig Raising Unit's Meeting,” written by a state funeral worker.Footnote 5 It says,
Why is there such a high death rate for the pigs? Is it because the quality of the pigs was poor [in the first place] or is it because of the quality of our subjective management?Footnote 6 I think it is because subjectively we did not work hard enough, and this led to the pigs’ death, even though the quality of the Qingpu pigs was indeed not very good. From our work unit to other work units, we can all observe this. Now let's examine this more specifically:
1. Our cleaning job is not good enough. [ . . . ] The pigs are like humans. If they live in a humid environment, they get sick. Pigs die from being ill.
2. We did not discover the correct intervals for feeding the pigs, so they became ill. This also happens to humans. If so, as we have a full meal this time but not enough to eat at the next meal, we too will experience stomach problems in the long term.
3. We were not attentive enough to our pigs in general. If we pay more attention to the pigs, we will know which pigs are getting sick and we can treat them right away, then we might be able to keep them alive. However, many people in the work units did not notice the pigs were ill until they were dying. How can you treat pigs when you don't even have enough time to diagnose them?
4. We did not protect against epidemics or quarantine pigs well so contagious disease caused a lot of deaths.
5. We failed to make a thorough examination of the pigs when we first bought them so new sick pigs lived with the old healthy ones. Contagion then brings death.
6. We did not classify the pigs and raise them accordingly. When you put big and small pigs together, the food will not be distributed evenly. [ . . . ]
7. We have to admit that our bad management was the primary cause of their deaths. Subjectively speaking, it is because we did not work hard enough and lacked experience. The poor quality of the pigs was just one of the objective factors. From now on, we should use subjective factors to overcome objective factors.
Perhaps the first question this report raises is why it even exists. I was incredulous to find that someone in a funeral governing institution, the Funeral Office, needed to write a report to explain why pigs died. It turns out, though, that pig raising was not only intimately related to funeral and interment governance in certain periods in Shanghai. It also represented one of the crucial ideas of funeral governance: the desire to transform something that, to the Party, was inherently unproductive into something productive in a literal sense. Governing death and funerals was an effort to reverse alchemize uselessness into usefulness. In terms of this article, then, whereas the first two events illustrate attempts to eliminate previous and competing aspects of being a person in favor of a single, direct relationship with the state, this third one illustrates the introduction through the civil governance of death of new characteristics for being a proper socialist citizen.
The objectives of Shanghai funeral governance had fallen victim to and merged with the bigger movements of the Great Leap Forward that aimed to turn the unproductive cemeteries and labor force in the death industry into productive enterprises through technological innovation. One of the people whom I interviewed, Master Kao, worked in a funeral home during the 1950s and 1960s. He described how, at that time, he was one of the younger ones in his work unit, so he was always sent to collect grass to feed the pigs—this involved two hours or more of walking with a push cart filled with grass. I met Master Kao early on in my fieldwork. At that time, my Shanghainese was not very good, and he did not really speak Mandarin. I had to ask him to repeat several times what he had said in various ways to confirm that he was indeed talking about collecting pig feed as a part of his routine job at a funeral home. At that time, I certainly did not expect a funeral professional to need to know how to raise pigs.
In fact, the Funeral Office started its experiments with growing agricultural products in cemeteries at least as early as 1954. On March 15, 1956, the Shanghai government decided to nationalize all cemeteries. Around the same time, the Funeral Office submitted a proposal for how to distribute profits earned from agricultural products planted in these same cemeteries. This proposal described 80 mu (13 acres) of land that was being used to grow cotton and 30 mu (5 acres) for soybeans among the graves. The Funeral Office even planted potatoes and fava beans (broad beans) in various places to “make sure that no land [in cemeteries] was wasted.” In the next year, the Funeral Office divided the management of all twenty-four nationalized cemeteries into four larger ones: Lianyi, Longhua, Ji'an, and Dachang Cemeteries. This consolidation of ownership set the foundation for funeral governance during the Great Leap Forward.Footnote 7
The Great Leap Forward began in January 1958 and terminated in January 1961. The most famous part of the Great Leap Forward was probably the effort to set up smelting furnaces in every corner of China. People put their cookware and farming tools into backyard furnaces to produce steel (often of questionable quality) for industrial use. The Great Leap Forward consequently brought about massive deforestation and a disastrous famine nationwide between 1959 and 1961—the so-called Three Years of Natural Disasters, as some of my interlocutors (as well as current official discourse) called it. As far as funeral governance goes, the Great Leap Forward embraced the idea of turning “useless” land for funeral and interment into useful arable land. This idea contradicted traditional ideas of cemeteries and funeral-related spaces as dangerous and polluted and, therefore, places to be avoided.
In 1958, the Funeral Office asked its employees to grow fruit trees and commercial forests at their respective funeral institutions (including funeral parlors, crematoria, and cemeteries). In 1959, the Funeral Office initiated a pig-raising project as a key sideline enterprise for funeral institutions. In 1960, the Funeral Office focused more on revolutionizing the technology of funerals, interment, and pig raising. Examples of such technological innovations included “the addition of an automatic cutting machine for pig feed, special canvas body bags, electronic embalming machines and pig feed mixtures.” What exactly these innovations entailed (or even whether they were real beyond the documents they were listed in) was unclear from the report, but my point here is to give some idea of what the possible technological innovations in funeral institutions were at that time (at least in people's imagination) and how these were, in fact, a jumbled mixture of human and pig-related technologies.
When the dead were forced to share their resting place with domestic animals, the two did not necessarily coexist in peace. I encountered many reports, including the one quoted at the beginning of this section, pointing out recurrent problems with high death rates of pigs at the Funeral Office's properties. One report written in February 1960 recorded a 19 percent death rate for pigs raised at Longhua Cemetery, 0.9 percent at Lianyi Cemetery, 5 percent at Wan'an Cemetery, 12.8 percent at Xijin Funeral Home, 20 percent at Anle Funeral Home, and 19.4 percent at Guohua Funeral Home. The Funeral Office tried hard to meet its quotas since it only had 640 pigs and the goal was to have 1,350 pigs by August 1960.Footnote 8 These high death rates were serious business. Several of these reports, like the one quoted at length earlier, explored the causes of the pig's deaths through the classic Chinese Communist genre of self-criticism.
I suggest that the Funeral Office's workers used these self-criticism reports as allegories. For example, reason two describes how pigs are like humans and how both died from unstable food sources. While these workers might have been novices at pig raising, they certainly knew a great deal about human death. To wonder why so many pigs died is, in a way, to ascertain why so many fellow human beings were dying. During the later years of the Great Leap Forward, the fate of the pigs merged with the fate of human beings and these report writers, while certainly trying to redouble their efforts, did not know what they could do to keep the pigs (and themselves) alive. Given the seemingly odd intermixing on the technological innovation list and the parallels between the pig's fate and the simultaneous disasters of the Great Leap Forward, it is not too far-fetched to argue that pigs were an analogy for humans in this case.
To be clear, I am not saying that there is only one way to read the symbolic meaning of pigs in the history of China or in some sort of abstract “Chinese culture.” Pigs are animals and therefore stand, too, as the opposite of humanity. As such, one way to curse people in Chinese is to name someone a pig. For example, when the GMD took over Taiwan from the Japanese, local Taiwanese described this change as “after pigs left, dogs came” (zhuqu goulai). By evoking pigs as the opposite of humanity this phrase was meant to describe how both regimes were animal-like, and therefore neither one was all that much better than the other. Pigs and chickens, however, were also the two most common domestic animals in Chinese villages. They have long occupied a privileged position in Chinese family subsistence economies (Schmalzer Reference Schmalzer2016). Moreover, pigs are the default meat in Han Chinese diets, and therefore they symbolize prosperity. In this sense, pigs enjoyed a kind of status in terms of measuring wealth that chickens did not have. Furthermore, the centrality of pigs in the diets of Han Chinese also meant that eating pork has long been a crucial identity marker for distinguishing Han and Muslim Chinese, as well as to distinguish different degrees of Muslim-ness (Gladney Reference Gladney1996). Such a close relationship between humans and pigs for Han Chinese, complete with both positive and negative connotations, makes pigs an easy, at-hand analogy for human lives.
In her early work, Emily Martin Ahern (Reference Ahern1973) suggested that pigs were a key analogy for humans in Han Chinese popular religion exactly because of pigs’ close connection to humans. In Sigrid Schmalzer's (Reference Schmalzer2016) documentation of the development of socialist and scientific agricultural practices in China, she not only shows a deep connection between humans and pigs in Chinese rural villages in general but also, in particular, the privileged position of pigs, as opposed to other animals, in the CCP's imagination and attempts to increase economic development. While I am hesitant to go as far as Martin to say that pigs symbolize or stand in for the human more generally, I do think that in the context of the Great Leap Forward, when raising pigs was at the center of increasing agricultural productivity in socialist China, this link is quite strong. Given the parallels between human and pig suffering on top of these analogical connections within funeral professionals’ cultural repertoire and the fact that, as funeral professionals, they would have been most clearly aware of the upticks in human death, it is not far-fetched to interpret this striking example of funeral professionals’ self-criticism as allegory questioning why humans were themselves dying—a question that was officially explained away as a “natural disaster” rather than a human disaster, therefore needing no further explanation.
The path and fate of humans and animals finally diverged as the Great Leap Forward campaigns faded out in Shanghai's governance of death. On March 12, 1961 (after the Great Leap Forward had just been terminated), the Funeral Office submitted a letter to the Civil Affairs Bureau and copied it to the Shanghai Poultry and Eggs Company (PEC). In this letter, the Funeral Office requested that the Civil Affairs Bureau force the PEC to clean up the cemetery that was on loan to it so that it would be clean prior to the April Tomb Sweeping Festival. The Funeral Office also proposed to terminate its lending out of this cemetery to the PEC. The letter says, “According to our most recent investigation, there were 157 tombs that have lost their burial mounds. Among these, five coffins were exposed in the ground. Another 690 burial mounds are now filled with small and large holes.” This was in addition to the fact that many tombstones had been moved. The Funeral Office thought that as far as future plans were concerned, it was “inappropriate to use cemeteries to raise chickens because when chickens scavenge, they dig into the burial mounds. Chickens scavenge the earth every day and every hour so there is no way to fix the holes in the burial mounds. There are just too many holes.”Footnote 9
When a state funeral practitioner's job turns into the raising of pigs and when the sideline enterprises of funeral institutions are agricultural production and animal husbandry, it goes to show how the funeral industry had been moved toward being a productive site in the most literal sense. This is not to say that other Chinese ideas or practices of funeral and interment have nothing to do with increasing the material welfare of the living or fertility as commonly observed in funerals cross-culturally (Bloch and Perry Reference Bloch, Parry, Bloch and Parry1982; Hertz [Reference Hertz1907] 1960). Quite the opposite, traditional Chinese funeral rituals such as choosing an auspicious cemetery plot based on fengshui, burying the deceased at a certain time and date, and burning ritual money and other goods for the use of the deceased all aimed to make the dead happy. This was in return for calling on the dead to protect and bless the living with material benefits. Moreover, this was not just in imperial China: Marc Moskowitz (Reference Moskowitz2011) shows in his documentary film on the popularization of funeral strippers since the 1980s a deep connection between fertility, production, and death in contemporary Taiwan as well. The difference under CCP rule during the 1950s and 1960s, however, was the deliberate removal of the mediation and supernatural role of the dead. The magical protection and blessings from the dead did not bring wealth. Instead, it was to be the work of the living under the CCP's supervision—quite literally on the fertile backs of the dead—that was to increase productivity and bring wealth to the whole of society. The CCP was turning feudal ritual spaces into productive fields for all to see. As such, by turning the useless to usefulness, the state's development of agricultural and animal husbandry sideline industries especially strived to cultivate a particular sort of work ethic for funeral professionals as a new kind of socialist citizen.
Conclusion: The Making of Political Subjects at the End of Life
I have delineated here the birth of civil governance of death through an examination of how funeral governance in Shanghai was carried out, based on the mundane work of state funeral professionals. After the CCP took over China, funeral governance first occupied itself with the task of nationalizing funeral institutions. The goal of nationalization went well beyond shifts in economic wealth or power, even though the acts appeared to focus purely on changes in ownership, right down to the inventory lists recorded when each parlor was nationalized. While the “objects” to be nationalized were foreign capital, Chinese capital, and religious organizations, the intended effect was to eliminate different ways of conceptualizing the dead and their relationships to the living. From the existence of external others (such as the cosmopolitan/colonial foreign company) to internal others (such as native place associations) and religious belonging, each of these policies says something about how the state went about erasing alternative possibilities for what being a Shanghainese or Chinese person might mean. With the removal of funeral institutions built upon differentiated group identities, the state's intention was to leave individuals only with the choice of linking themselves and their dead more directly to the state without intermediation. The destruction of horizonal ties and the relationship between a person with private companies, native associations, and religious affiliation was the first step in constructing socialist citizenship.
The state's effort to diminish alternate sources of identification was also carried out by its cremation campaigns at the level of kin groups. A key to this was that the CCP's attempt to destroy the foundation of both Confucian and popular religious ideas of a person, as these assumed that properly performed funerary rites and body burials transformed the deceased into ancestors. While persuading the chief mourners to accept cremation, funeral practitioners worked, too, at alienating specific individuals from their larger kinship-based social networks (and the “bad influence” of those networks). Promoting cremation therefore became a governing technique of alienating individuals from their kinship ties to family members, both living and dead, and eliminating family influence on that part of who they were. As such, the governing rationale of nationalization and promoting cremation was to atomize both funeral professionals and the bereaved such that their sole connection and loyalty could go straight to the state without any dilution or competition from different social loyalties or “contamination” through associational and kinship ties. These governing techniques used in deploying the civil governance of death were meant to eliminate previously strong intersubjective (such as links to ancestors and fellow family members) and associational (such as native place associations or private companies) ties within the world of the living and between the living and the dead.
Finally, if my discussions of the nationalization of funeral institutions and the alienation of the dead from the living explain the CCP's endeavors in creating political subjects by eradicating institutional ties and intersubjective ties, leaving only direct links between the individuals and the party-state, the discussion of the radical socialist period explains how the CCP attempted to manufacture a new kind of political subject. That is, the Great Leap Forward era enacted changes to funeral homes and cemeteries attempting to transform them from places of ritual, remembrance, and grief to sites of production where agricultural products flourished, pigs thrived, and, eventually, socialist citizenship would be realized and reaffirmed. As the centrality of the dead receded there, new socialist workers were produced and advanced. Instead of being an end, death was to become a productive site where New China's new citizens were grown. As such, individuals were being atomized even as they were “liberated” in the CCP's venture into creating political subjects. These funeral governing policies were a key part of the larger social and cultural engineering performed by the state to reduce horizontal ties among people in favor of vertical ties between “the People” (a single, undifferentiated public) and the party-state.
While data presented in this article are about Funeral Reform in Shanghai in the 1950s and 1960s, the analytical framework developed here provides a critical piece for understanding the CCP's Funeral Reforms of the most recent thirty years as well, at least in Shanghai, if not in other parts of urban China. Elsewhere I have discussed how, following the Cultural Revolution, high-level officials debated whether Funeral Reform should be seen as merely a product of Maoist radicalism and therefore be kept in the past or whether it should instead be seen as the CCP's long-term goal in governing death and therefore continued alongside market reforms (Liu Reference Liu2015). Their then final decision was that Funeral Reform was not a product of radicalism and therefore should be continued in the present and into the future. In order to respond to calls for market economic reforms, however, officials had to redefine and expand Funeral Reform so that the funeral industry could continue to carry out civil governance at the same time as it began generating profit. The larger project that this article is based on exactly tackles how a new governing orientation, one tending toward economic efficiency, profits, and individuals, has emerged in conjunction with the civil governance of death and its construction of political subjects. Yet, even today, an understanding of these reform-era developments depends on an understanding of the deep roots to the emergence of civil governance and the sort of citizen-subjects it aimed at creating.
Acknowledgments
In addition to my funeral practitioner interlocutors, this article would not have been possible without the critical comments and care of my dissertation supervisor, Robert Weller, and my second and third readers, Charles Lindholm and Kimberly Arkin from Boston University. I also wish to thank Thomas Barfield, Donald J. Hatfield, Robert Hefner, Paul Katz, Marc Moskowitz, Evelyn Rawski, Ruth Toulson, Kellee Tsai, and Matthew West, as well as the four anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Asian Studies for the advice they provided on writing and revising various versions of what became this paper. Finally, I am grateful for the financial support I received from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee's Early Career Scheme Grant, an Initiative Grant from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a Cora Du Bois Fellowship from Harvard University, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship from Boston University, and a National Study Abroad Scholarship from the Taiwan Ministry of Education (Republic of China). The views expressed here as well as any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.
