China to ban storing remains of dead in ‘bone ash apartments’ | China

China is introducing a law to prevent people from storing the ashes of their deceased relatives in vacant high-rise apartments rather than paying high costs for dwindling burial space.

China’s new funeral management legislation will ban the use of “residences specifically for the purpose of storing cremated remains” and the burial of bodies or the construction of tombs “in areas other than public cemeteries.”

The law will come into force on Tuesday ahead of Sunday’s Qingming grave-sweeping festival, a traditional Chinese celebration in which people clean the graves of their ancestors and make ritual offerings.

The practice of using an apartment to store ashes, known as “guhui fang” or bone ash apartments, has increased as rapid urbanization and a rapidly aging population increase competition and cost for limited cemetery plots in cities.

The empty apartment is used as a ritual hall; people transform the area into ancestral shrines with candles, red lights and vases lined by generation.

According to the 2020 global funeral expense survey conducted by insurance company SunLife, China’s funeral expenses rank second in the world after Japan.

In contrast, property prices fell 40% between 2021 and 2025. This was partly due to Xi Jinping’s “properties are for living, not for speculation” campaign to curb excessive speculation in the real estate market.

Cemetery plots in China also come with only 20-year leases, while residential properties have government-backed 70-year tenure rights. As a result, many Chinese citizens now view apartments as a better value than cemeteries as a place to store their loved ones’ remains.

A hashtag about the ban was viewed more than 7 million times on China’s X-equivalent Weibo, and social media users expressed skepticism about the measure.

“Who’s going to go in and check? Or are they planning to put a GPS tracker in every jar?” said one user. “Even at 90% off, cemetery plots are still too expensive,” another wrote.

China has one of the fastest growing aging populations in the world. The number of deaths was 9.8 million in 2015, recording 11.3 million deaths in 2025; This figure is much higher than the country’s 7.9 million births in the same year.

Faced with increasing numbers of burials and a dwindling supply of land, authorities in major cities such as Shanghai are subsidizing costs for those opting for “ecological burial methods,” including “deep ground burial or sea burial of cremated remains.”

In 2025, Shanghai’s burials at sea reached a record high, exceeding 10,000 cases for the first time.

Additional reporting by Lillian Yang