No Resting for the Dead: Relocation of Emigrant Graves in 1950s South China

Recent research on mid-twentieth-century Chinese death governance has focused on the impacts of grave relocation and burial reform in townships across the Lower Yangtze region and western China, but little has been written about southern China’s extensive migratory networks and resources that enabled overseas Chinese and their remaining relatives to bypass, circumvent, and thwart the Maoist state’s “grave clearing” campaign. This article draws on the declassified county-level archival documents in eastern Guangdong’s Chaoshan region to examine the profound effects of grave relocation in areas with a rich history of emigration to Southeast Asia. It balances a macro-level study of state behaviors in the management of deathscape with a micro-level analysis of emigrants’ experience. Faced with a centralizing state determined to convert scattered graves into arable land, emigrants adjusted and adapted to the coercive policy by aligning their feeling of ancestral attachment with the utilitarian agenda of rural party cadres. At a time when the Maoist government transformed Chaoshan from a transnationally connected environment into a state-centric agrarian society, how emigrant graves were removed to create room for collectivization greatly impacted the migratory process.