From
The Times
January 26, 2007
Gang preyed on rural
superstition
Undertaker was link with
families
A ring of gangsters who traded
in the bodies of women they
murdered, selling them as brides
to keep dead bachelors happy in
the afterlife, has been arrested
in China.
The arrests have exposed a
trade that places a higher value
on women when they are dead than
when they are alive.
Yang Dongyan, 35, was
arrested on January 4 in
Sha’anxi province as he played
cards with his children. In his
prison cell, Mr Yang showed
little remorse for committing
two murders. He told the
Legal Daily: “I just wanted
to make money. It’s a quick way
to make money. I was arrested
too soon otherwise I had planned
to do this business a few more
times.”
Two accomplices, Liu Shengbao
and Hui Haibao, were also
arrested, as was Li Longsheng, a
self-styled undertaker who
traded the bodies to bereaved
families.
The men preyed on the
superstitions of ill-educated
farmers eager to ensure that a
dead son was happy in the
afterlife. It is not uncommon in
rural parts of China for a
family to seek out the body of a
woman who has died to be buried
alongside their son after the
performance of a marriage
ceremony for the deceased pair.
Ancestor worship is a
tradition that runs through many
aspects of Chinese life. One of
the main Chinese festivals is
Tomb Sweeping Day, when families
visit graves of their forebears
to clean them and burn incense.
The spirit is believed to live
on in the afterlife and at
funerals families burn offerings
of paper money and models of
houses, cars and other little
luxuries that the dead may need.
Mr Yang chanced upon the
trade in dead bodies when he
paid 12,000 yuan (£800) for a
mentally handicapped woman whose
family hoped to marry her off
for a price. The trade in women
as wives is a common practice in
rural China and a woman may be
sold several times by
intermediaries before meeting
her eventual husband.
Mr Yang arranged for the
woman to stay in a guesthouse in
Yanchuan county where Mr Liu
offered him £666 for her. Mr
Yang refused, until Mr Liu told
him that the woman would be
worth much more dead than alive.
The next morning the two men set
out across the Yellow River to
meet “Old Li” in Xixian County,
Shanxi province. Old Li agreed
to buy the woman’s body for
£1,050 and to complete the deal
late at night on the Yanshuiguan
bridge.
The next day Mr Yang killed
the woman and took her body by
taxi to the bridge where Mr Li
was waiting and handed over
£1,000 for her. For his part in
the deal, Mr Liu received £300
and Mr Yang came away with a
loss of £200 after his expenses.
Back at the guesthouse, Mr
Yang told an old acquaintance,
Mr Hui, that he had found an
easy way to make money. The two
men agreed to go into the body
business together. Last November
they sought out a prostitute
they knew in nearby Yan’an — the
city where Chairman Mao began
his Communist revolution — but
she threw them out after they
said that they could not afford
to pay her £20. They returned
the next morning and killed her.
On December 3 they completed
a similar body handover with Mr
Li on the bridge. This time they
made only £530 because the buyer
was unhappy with the quality of
the body and, after costs, Mr
Yang and his two friends each
earned £100 on that deal.
Old Li had made a name for
himself in Xixian county by
selling clothes to outfit the
dead and by handing out cards
that offered to help families in
need of a spirit marriage. They
want young and good-looking dead
brides for their sons and regard
the family of the girl as
“in-laws”. Police discovered
that Mr Li paid between £530 and
£660 for a body and sold it on
for as much as £2,300.
Zhang Yanjun, chief of police
in Yanchuan county, said: “It’s
lucky that the case was cleared
up in time or we don’t know how
many women would have been
killed by them. These people
thought they had found a short
cut to wealth.” Instead, they
face the death penalty.
Fatal attraction
- Traditional Chinese
belief holds that the living
must tend to the wants and
needs of dead relatives, who
exist in an afterlife
- The tradition manifests
itself in the burning of
fake money or paper models
of luxury goods
- It is believed by some
that an unmarried life is
incomplete, leading to the
practice of minghun —
burying single sons with
recently dead young women to
provide them with a wife in
the afterlife
- Parents of a dead
daughter often regard the
money received in selling
her for minghun as
recompense for the dowry
that they did not receive in
her lifetime, while also
posthumously elevating their
child’s place in a
patriarchal society
- Communist authorities
tried to ban the practice,
which datesfrom the Zhou
dynasty (1122-256BC). It was
also forbidden in the Book
of Rites, texts that
describe religious practices
from the eighth to the fifth
century BC
- Minghun survives mainly
in the poor rural north,
particularly in the remote
plateau on the upper reaches
of the Yellow River
Source: agencies
************************************************
China's grave offense: Ghost wives
BEIJING - Ghost stories might have been recently exorcised from
bookshelves by Chinese censors for the horror they inflict on the
public, but equally grisly tales of "ghost wives" have been unfolding in
real life.
When Shen Wentang, a peasant from central China's Hebei province, bought
a "ghost wife" for his dead father, he asked no questions about where
the body had come from - and showed little curiosity about finding this
out.
He knew that things had changed from the past, when an afterlife
marriage was nothing out of the ordinary and families of both the
"bride" and "groom" would have celebrated it with toasts and a feast.
Authorities now frown on these feudal customs, so Shen wanted the
marriage done quickly and without much ado. Still, he was grateful that
the body of the ghost wife was dressed in a shroud in the auspicious
color for weddings - red.
He had had to borrow funds to pay for the body, and 3,500 yuan (US$454)
exceeded the annual earnings of many of his home village. Then, working
swiftly with two relatives one spring dawn, Shen unearthed his father's
grave, lifted the coffin's lid and slipped the female body inside.
All he remembered of the woman later on were the red dress and her age -
about 40. Shen's father, whose wife had walked away years ago, now had a
new woman to keep him company in the netherworld. He could rest in
peace.
Little did Shen know that the ghost wife - a mentally retarded woman -
had been lured to her death by a profit-seeking peasant. The ghost wife
and five other women had been murdered by Song Tiantang, from Hebei's
Linzhang county, so he could sell their corpses to be married in the
afterlife.
"I only helped them to go to heaven earlier," Song said when detained by
the police in April, according to Chinese press reports. Ironically for
a mass murderer, Song's given name, Tiantang, means "heaven" in
Mandarin.
In an interview with Beijing's Xinjingbao newspaper, he unabashedly
described how he always chose his victims from among the mentally
retarded or single migrant women.
"They are muddle-headed and never put up too much of a fight," he said.
"No one would make much fuss about deranged women. As for those who come
from other places, they would simply disappear, and their relatives back
home would not know anything."
The custom of marrying bachelors posthumously and burying them together
with dead women goes back a few hundred years to the Ming Dynasty.
Chinese people believe that the journey to the netherworld needs to be a
shared one. In the past, they also used matchmakers to find partners for
their dead relatives.
Zhao Shu, an expert on China's folk customs, reckons that the tradition
of marrying people in the afterlife is nowadays merely a vestige of the
country's long feudal history, practiced only in a few isolated areas.
But he admits that some families still pay a high price to procure a
bride for the deceased. "It is seen as a last comfort for the dead," he
said.
The current resurrection of these feudal customs in Hebei bears an
unusually ugly twist.
When Song embarked on his moneymaking scheme, he first sought to dig up
and steal dead women's bodies. But he soon realized that the price of a
desiccated corpse was just a fraction of what he could earn for "fresh
goods" - women who had died only recently. Then he started to murder
women.
Song's killing spree was exposed by China's increasingly daring media as
yet another unforeseen dark side of the country's headlong pursuit of
economic growth. With millions of rural people left on the fringes of
the economic boom, more and more cases of moral degradation have come to
light as people are willing to go to any lengths to make money.
The story of murdered ghost wives has appeared almost simultaneously
with the uncovering of a wide slave-labor network in China's backward
hinterland provinces, where thousands of migrant workers and children
were forced to work in illegal brick kilns (see
Lessons from China's slavery scandal, June 20). They were beaten,
starved and overworked under the watch of guards and dogs.
Some of the workers and children were abducted from rural train and bus
stations or persuaded to travel to the kilns with bogus offers of good
pay. Once there, they were prevented from leaving, and those who failed
to work fast enough were beaten, some of them to death.
"Whether it is the slave-labor scandal or the ghost wives, it is all a
testimony to moral depravity brought on by the extreme pursuit of
material gains," said an opinion piece in the liberal Southern Weekend
last week. "It shows the collapse of moral and spiritual values at this
time of rapid social changes."
As in the slavery case, the murders of ghost wives occurred in some of
China's poorest provinces. Song Tiantang hailed from Linzhang county,
Hebei province, and scouted neighboring counties for his victims.
An investigation by Southern Weekly uncovered similar cases of women
murdered to be sold as brides in marriages in the afterlife in the
provinces of Shanxi and neighboring Shaanxi.
Some have speculated that the murders have been prompted by the mounting
death toll in China's mining industry, which has pushed up demand for
ghost wives for casualties. In many of the interior provinces where coal
is produced in small and unsafe mines, deadly accidents have been
happening weekly. China's official tally of coal miners' deaths for 2006
stood at 4,746, or an average of 13 each day.
With so many male miners dying prematurely, there is a booming market
for ghost wives, one middleman told Xinjingbao. "If the groom has died
in a coal-mine accident, my commission for finding a bride is higher,"
the man, identified as Wang Zengxi, told the paper.
But even if confined to just several provinces, the commercialization of
ghost wives could have social implications for this country of 1.3
billion people, where demographers estimate that some 40 million girls
are already "missing" because of infanticide or neglect, and as a result
of China's one-child policy.
In their 2004 book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's
Surplus Male Population, Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer warn
about the looming danger of social and political instability stemming
from a glut of young men with no prospects of marriage.
*******************
Five people have been
arrested in China for
digging up the corpse of a
young woman to be a "ghost
bride" for a man killed in a
car crash.
The suspects included a
grieving father who
allegedly paid his four
accomplices around £2,700
pounds to find a female to
be his son's companion in
the afterlife.
The men were caught after
unearthing the remains of a
teenage girl who had
poisoned herself after
failing her university
entrance exams last year. In
rural China, superstitious
villagers have for centuries
sought out the bodies of
recently deceased woman to
be ghost brides for young
men who die single.
Marriage ceremonies are
conducted for the two
corpses, and the bride is
placed in the same grave as
her husband.
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