SHANGHAI – The municipal civil affairs bureau announced it is drafting a revised law to regulate funeral services, following an armed battle last week at the scene of a fatal traffic accident.
It wasn’t an argument over which driver was at fault but a fight between gangs from rival mortuaries seeking to take away and bury the crash victim’s bodies, still lying in pools of blood.
Though most of the gang members escaped, police arrested one leader, Zhou Wancheng, 46, who admitted in court that he had employed 18 hooligans to help monopolize the local industry for two years, during which he made huge profits selling caskets and other funereal services, including arranging post-service dinners with music and dancing girls.
But many Shanghainese complain that most of the services offered by the city’s morticians are downright shoddy. Gu Wenjing, who recently buried his grandpa said “the band mostly laughed and smoked cigarettes, the flowers were wilted, the mourners sighed instead of weeped and the dancers all had bad legs and pot bellies. What a disgrace.”
According to prosecutor Liu Yan, Zhou ordered his gang to get the details of families who had suffered recent bereavements from local hospital emergency units and mortuaries, and either bullied or beat his competitors into submission.
Over two years, the gang attacked the premises and staff of four rival funeral services, instigated armed fights and extorted hundreds of thousands of renminbi from competitors in return for Zhou “withdrawing his service from certain hospitals”, said Liu.
Zhou, whose nickname is Little Shit, opened a store in 1999 to sell wreaths but soon realized the big money was in caskets and post-funeral feasts, and built up his business with the view of taking a larger market share.
This practice has become common since gangsters started staking out turf in Shanghai’s lucrative mortuary business. Traditionally, undertakers are believed to be bearers of bad luck, dirty people whose social status ranks somewhere between nightsoil gatherers and maggots. As such, no self-respecting Shanghainese becomes a mortician, leaving the business of preparing the dead for the afterworld to the underworld gangsters. Nicknamed “funeral rascals,” the gangsters make a killing by charging exorbitant prices for everything from a shroud to transporting a body.
In one case, Zhou related how he called the relatives of a deceased male and said, “We have your uncle, he stinks. Pay 5,000 kuai if you want him back as is, or pay 10,000 kuai and give him a decent burial.”
Typically, these gangsters bribe police and hospital officials for information about critically ill patients, traffic accidents or shootings. When they receive word of a fatality, they move in to claim the body and begin preparations for the funeral, even before relatives have been notified.
Police said there have been several cases of funeral companies whisking away cadavers only to discover later that they are still breathing. What’s more, accident sites and hospital emergency rooms become the scenes of bloody brawls as morticians battle over access to the deceased. When family members arrive to claim their loved ones, they are presented with a bill and a choice: pay up, get lost or join the deceased.
Officials say crooked funeral businesses are also corrupting police by bribing officers for tips about traffic deaths.
“Whoever gets to toss a shroud over the body first gets the business,” says Lin Liang-sheng, an official in the Shanghai municipal government, which is trying to crack down on gangsters’ growing influence in the business.
Employees at city-run morgues and graveyards take bribes from funeral parlors and several have been beaten for demanding bribes considered too high. Eight people recently broke into a funeral parlor in Putou District, and beat its workers and smashed urns of ashes. “It is a deeply intertwined structure of collusion,” Lin added.
Funerals are a big business in Shanghai. When an auspicious date is picked for the funeral, bands lead processions through the streets in hopes this will guide the spirit to a happier afterlife.
A funeral is also a status symbol. In some cases, processions try to attract attention with strippers or scantily clad singers. By some estimates, guests at nearly one-third of funerals were being entertained by naked women.
At a recent funeral for an influential local businessman, bands, honor guards and mourners riding in more than 100 Mercedes-Benz cars made up a nearly two mile procession that wound through the streets of Pudong, accompanied by 144 skanky broads.
The lavish and complex funeral ceremonies create many opportunities to make a buck. Zhou said his enterprise can get handmade coffins that look like a Prada handbag, lobster, onion, shoe, Coke bottle and even a cigarette. “It all depends on the lifestyle of the deceased,” he said, adding that for those who prefer cremation, we can take a tablespoon of remains and send it to this company which turns those remains into a diamond by extracting the carbon from your ashes. “Needless to add, the created diamond is a one of a kind and last forever.”
Gangsters take advantage of the fact that few family members are in a mood to dicker over funeral prices, and haggling can be seen as a lack of respect for the dead. An average funeral thus costs the equivalent of RMB 10,000, about three times the average monthly income. For more elaborate services, the sky’s the limit.
But taking on the city’s undertakers is dangerous work. Zhou has sworn that when he’s released he will “take certain rivals and officials for a short ride from which they will never return.”
Around 100,000 people die each year in Shanghai, while that number is expected to increase due to an aging population.
However, of the 100-plus agencies based in the city, only 21 are officially certified, according to the local government
