CHINA: Feudal Custom of Getting ‘Ghost Wives’ Far from Dead

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Jun 27 2007 (IPS) - 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 China’s central 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 have 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 colour for weddings – red.

He had had to borrow funds to pay for the body, and 3,500 yuan (454 U.S. dollars) 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 was 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 nether world. 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 first name, Tiantang, means ‘heaven’ in Chinese.

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 nether world needs to be a shared one. In the past, they had used also 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, practised 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 out and steal dead women’s bodies. But he soon realised that the price of a desiccated corpse was just a fraction of what he could earn for ‘fresh goods’ – women who died only recently. Then, he started to murder women.

Shen’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 labour network in China’s backward hinterland provinces, where thousands of migrant workers and children were forced to work in illegal brick kilns.

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 labour 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.”

Like in the slavery case, the murders of ghost wives occurred in some of China’s poorest provinces. Shen Tiantang hailed from Linzhang county in Hebei province and scouted neighbouring 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, also in the backward provinces of Shanxi and neighbouring 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 coalminers’ 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 out there 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 commercialisation of ‘ghost wives’ could have social implications for this country of 1.2 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’, authors 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.