Qingming values remain the same

Since ancient times, Qingming, or Tomb Sweeping Festival, has been a time for honoring ancestors and mourning deceased relatives. Although it is still regarded as a serious and solemn family ceremony in modern China, its nature is changing due to the transformation of society.

In old days, the Qingming festival was a solemn occasion, a time for paying one's respects to the dead, and it was closely related to the land-oriented and kindred structure of society. Ancestral memorial temples and graves were major ritual spaces during Qingming, while large and stable clan family groups ensured continuity in the rituals.

However, these rituals were more than just ancestor worship, as they focused on enhancing the sense of kinship within the clan and remembering its history. Although the rituals were mainly private activities, the participants usually performed the ceremony on a clan basis and as such the ceremony served the function of strengthening authority within the clan discussions and decision-making. Meanwhile, the ancestor worship also reinforced one of the most important Chinese virtues - filial piety.

But Qingming has changed as society has changed, and the distinctive characteristics of modern life are the "distances" between people, their separation from the land and the weakening of the clan identity.

The ever-declining per capita land resources due to the huge population pressure, several rounds of land related reforms and urban expansion, and the rapid urbanization process in recent decades have reduced people's access to land. The shrinking of land resources has forcefully changed the traditional Chinese custom of burying the dead. As the popularity of cremation and other new ecological ways of disposing of the dead, such as sea burials, grows, the ritual space of Qingming has changed from the graveyards in family lands to public cemeteries, mourning halls, even the ocean.

The modernization of people's minds, the urbanization of people's lifestyles, the ever-increasing migration from rural to urban areas since reform and opening-up, and the transition in the family structure from large family groups of the same clan to nuclear families, all make Qingming a different and more individual festival than before. Even in the rural areas, the power of clan consciousness has declined in daily life as people's way of life changes and they become more and more removed from their land and their forefathers.