Average funeral costs for urban Beijingers $12,877: report

Beijing urban residents spend an average of 80,000 yuan ($12,877) on funerals, a figure which 90 percent believe is far too high, according to a report released on Wednesday, prior to the traditional Chinese Tomb-Sweeping Festival on April 5.

The average cost of funerals, including a memorial ceremony and burial in Beijing, is 42,837 yuan. Rural Beijingers spend an average of 22,750 yuan, while urban Beijingers spend 80,000 yuan, according to a report jointly released by the 101 research bureau under the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Social Sciences Academic Press.

The average cost of burial for rural residents in Beijing is around 4,750 yuan, but can be as high as 70,000 yuan for urban residents, the report said.

"The funeral costs in Beijing are among the highest in the country," Zeng Hanliu, an expert at the 101 research bureau, told the Global Times.

She said that the soaring cost of land and increasing demand for graveyards have driven up the cost of burial in Beijing.

Beijing residents have complained about overpriced graveyards for several years, as the cost of a one-square-meter grave can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan, several times more costly than the city's already-expensive housing.

Meanwhile, the number of residents willing to choose so-called "ecological funerals" - a catch-all term encompassing several forms of cremation - is still very low, Zeng added. "Most cemeteries still save a large portion of their land for graves, and promote ecological funerals in a very limited space at the very far end of the cemeteries," Zeng said.

Beijing introduced ecological funerals in the 1990s. Only 1,200 "sea funerals" - wherein the ashes are laid to rest in a body of water - were performed in 2014, versus around 80,000 deaths in the capital annually, according to the Beijing Times.

To cope with limited land resources, the municipal government plans to reduce the acreage of graves from the current maximum of no more than one square meter to 0.5 or 0.4 square meters, said the newspaper. There is so far no final decision on the new standard.

Zeng believed the most effective way to solve the problem is to promote ecological funerals, including increased government subsidies for those who choose it.