Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. x, 190 pp. (Maps, coloured photos). US$30.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9780520381971.
The Funeral of Mr. Wang: Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China is a nuanced ethnographical take on major transitions and transformations in twenty-first-century Chinese society. Through the lens of an ordinary man’s funeral, Andrew Kipnis on the one hand shows how the urbanized, commercialized, and individualized China has altered the afterlife of the people; on the other hand, the author notes the continued influence of familial relationships and the increased presence of the Communist Party in the private occasions of its citizenry.
The book begins with a pseudonymized Mr. Wang, who was a low-ranking Communist Party member. As urban dwellers in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, the Wang family did not have much knowledge of how to handle a death and thus hired a company to provide comprehensive services including cremation, farewell gathering, and burial. Despite their genuine grief for their father, Mr. Wang’s adult children chose economical options from the service menu offered by the company’s representative. Organized by professional service providers and attended by a small number of relatives and former colleagues, Mr. Wang was honoured with a simplified and streamlined funeral. The Wang family did not have much time to mourn as they were occupied with navigating bureaucratic and logistical challenges and performing the appropriate funerary rituals.
Through this study of urban death rituals, Kipnis illustrates major changes in contemporary urban China. Urbanization has led to the spaces of the dead becoming separated from those of the living alongside changes in kinship structures. Commercialization of all aspects of life has created the “one-stop dragon” companies, which guide families of the deceased in purchasing urns, filing paperwork with the local authorities, and performing rituals. The traditionally intimate space of funerals is occupied by commissioned strangers. Relatives play less significant roles in arranging funerary matters due to the shrinking family unit and rising private economy. Despite these arguably familiar stories about a rapidly changing China, Kipnis asserts that the maintenance of relations in the extended family remains important. As seen in Mr. Wang’s memorial service, his relatives came with cash gifts and flower wreaths, which were recorded by his children so that they could reciprocate in the future and perpetuate the familial network.
The rather lackluster memorial of Mr. Wang seems to demonstrate that spirits and ghosts have retreated from secularized China. Furthermore, urbanization has brought a life in which death is not encountered as frequently as before. Kipnis however argues that death, being alienated from life, “arguably becomes more fearsome, more unknown, and more haunting” (51). To make this point, he provides a fictional ghost story at the end of the book that illustrates the notion of urban haunting. The author emphasizes the limit of secularization in the sense that people still need to memorialize the past; funerals and cemeteries provide that opportunity. The language to honour the dead is steeped in religious terminology; therefore, the state cannot be entirely materialist. The book confirms how China still relies on its dead and continues to do so as it is undeniably humanistic.
The Funeral of Mr. Wang shows that death is not only a familial matter but also a political one. Funerals are occasions for protests, and cemeteries are spaces to contest the politics of memory. The deaths of political leaders who were seen as allies of the people’s wills in 1976 and 1989 were the rallying points for demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. In recent decades, all over China, deaths of lesser-known individuals have prompted localized protests over such issues as economic injustice and political corruption. Furthermore, Kipnis mentions the Cultural Revolution cemeteries scattered around Chongqing, which are devoted to people who died fighting for their work units. While these people were made into heroic soldiers who sacrificed for a cause, the Communist Party does not want to acknowledge their existence as they would remind people of the violence and upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the land of the dead is deeply contentious.
This ethnographical study makes a critical contribution to our grasp of the Chinese Communist Party. Kipnis shows that although the Communist leaders are supposedly secular, they do not try to ban funerals and burials, yet seek to regulate certain practices deemed superstitious, such as the burning of paper money. In addition, the Party is supposedly materialist, which means the absence of spirits and ghosts, yet the Party’s Propaganda Department is deeply concerned about “the soul of the Party” and allocates significant resources to commemorate its martyrs and to build elaborate graves for political leaders (109). Kipnis’ discussion of the paradoxical nature of the Chinese Communist Party makes this book relevant to political science.
Throughout the book, Kipnis engages with literature on urban death rituals in greater China by David Palmer, Ian Johnson, Christian Henriot, Huwy-min Lucia Liu, and Ruth Toulson. In addition, Kipnis brings China into the conversation of humanity via Thomas Laqueur. By doing so, Kipnis analyzes China through Western traditions, and it is here that I wish the author had pushed the analysis a bit further to show how China can challenge the Eurocentric humanistic discipline.
Linh D. Vu
Arizona State University, Tempe