Protests erupt in China’s Guizhou province over cremation mandate

Original article by Amy Hawkins

Protests have erupted in China’s southern Guizhou province, the latest in a string of rural demonstrations that have seen incidents of unrest increase by 70% compared with last year.

The protests in Shidong town started over the weekend in response to a directive from local authorities that people should be cremated rather than buried after their death.

Guizhou is a poor, rural province away from the urban hubs of Shenzhen and Shanghai.

In unverified footage from the protests shared on X by the protest-tracking account Yesterday Big Cat, a villager can be heard shouting: “If the Communist party is digging up ancestor’s graves, go dig up Xi Jinping’s ancestral tombs first”.

Another video collected by China Dissent Monitor (CDM), a project run by Freedom House, which tracks unrest in China, showed dozens of villagers surrounding a police car.

The local area has a high proportion of people of the Miao ethnicity, an ethnic minority for whom tradition dictates that the deceased should be buried rather than cremated.

On Tuesday, as the protests continued, the local government published a notice stating that the directive to promote burial rather than cremation was based on a 2003 law. It said that cremation was necessary to preserve land resources and promote a “frugal new funeral style”.

In recent years China has struggled with crowded cemeteries and the government has encouraged people to consider alternative funeral practices, such as sea burials.

But for many rural people, traditional burials are a core part of their culture.

One villager from Xifeng county, the administrative district for Shidong town, posted on social media that his grandfather had been cremated earlier in the year because of pressure from local officials. He said that his family was warned that failure to comply would lead to negative consequences for three generations.

Many comments on Douyin, a video-sharing app, were supportive of the protesters. “Yes everyone, let’s stand up and support traditional burial practices!” wrote one user.

This year CDM has recorded 661 rural protests in China, a 70% increase on the whole of 2024. In the third quarter of 2025, CDM logged nearly 1,400 incidents of unrest, a 45% increase on the same period in 2024.

Many protests appear to be driven economic struggles and related grievances.

But in some cases, such as the cremation protests in Guizhou, the initial trigger can be the state’s intrusion into what many people see as a deeply personal matter. Kevin Slaten, the research lead for CDM, said that the protests in Guizhou were unusual for the fact that they have lasted several days.

“Protests are more likely to be large scale and last longer if it involves something very personal. Whether that is a major hit to someone’s economic livelihood … or something like that’s their heritage or dealing with ancestors. People are much more likely to feel motivated to take the risk of protest.”

In August, a protest in Sichuan province over a school bullying incident spiralled into a multi-day clash between hundreds of locals and the authorities.

The Xifeng local government declined to comment.

Additional research by Lillian Yang