The Ethical Defense Of Funeral System Reform In Chinese Rural Area

The rain flies heavily as Qingming draws, and the passengers move sadly along the way. No man is immortal, but it’s very difficult to bury after death. It has been a highly controversial social issue that how to bury after death. Chinese traditional culture of filial reverence for ancestors gives the dead peace and the living comfort. Nowadays, the government decides to reform the inhumation to protect the shortage of arable land, forests, fresh water resources and the natural environment which human cannot live without as the contradiction between people and arable land is becoming increasingly outstanding. But the traditional concept of inhumation has a deep impact on rural villagers who hardly accept cremation by burning dead bodies, which leads to a series of tragedies in the resistance to the government. So we have to stop reform and think about it why Chinese peasants so strongly resist to cremation in moral sense, how to make cremation policy carry on smoothly in rural villages and how to make the cremation to be major in ethics defense.This paper mainly studies the funeral reform in Changru village, Youxian County, Hunan Province which helps to explore the reform of our national rural village funeral policy on ethics. It includes five aspects: Firstly, make a contrast between Zhoukou and Anqing’s failure in top-down reform of funeral policy and Changru’s success in down-top reform of funeral policy to reflect on the reform of funeral policy and explore the theories about the funeral reform at home and abroad. Secondly, do brief introductions about the meaning of funeral, all kinds of ways in funeral and the major programs of burial. Analysis and discuss the ethical dilemmas about performing cremation. Next, explore the moral origin of prevalent burial in rural villages, through living soul, ancestor worship, agricultural civilization, rigid hierarchy, filial piety and so on. Then, give a detailed description of the specific process about funeral reform in Changru village and a series of hardships to analysis the causes and impact of reform success. Lastly, combine the specific problems in Changru’s reform process with Chinese traditional funeral culture and through traditional culture’s value inheritance and environmental intergenerational equity to make ethics defense for carrying on cremation in Chinese rural area’s ethics possibility and propose some related ideas. So it gets a conclusion that cremation will eventually go out of the moral and ethical dilemma and popularize smoothly in China.