A Chinese man with Down’s syndrome was abducted and killed in a conspiracy to give another man his wish for burial rather than cremation.
Before he died of cancer in 2017, a man from Southeast China told his family he wanted a traditional funeral, but in some regions it is banned.
His family hired someone to find a replacement body that could be cremated in place of their family member.
But to them unknown, the man who hired them committed murder to provide the body.
In September 2020, the man hired by the family – identified only by his van Huang – receives a suspended death sentence for the murder.
While the assassination took place in 2017, the case only gained notoriety last week after an article about the incident in China came to wider attention.
Find a body
In the court documents, it appears that in 2017, Huang offered money through the family to provide them with another body because they wanted their deceased family member to have a traditional funeral.
The family lives in the city of Shanwei in Guangdong province, where the government requires all bodies to be cremated.
But while the family assumed he would look for another body, Huang killed someone to fulfill the agreement.
Huang sees a man with Down’s syndrome picking up rubbish from the street, and persuades him to get in a car and give the victim alcohol until he dies.
He then placed the body of the victim in a coffin and days later it was handed over to the family in exchange for money.
The family paid 107,000 yuan (£ 11,900; $ 16,300), of which 90,000 yuan went to the accused, while the rest went to a middleman who has since died.
Swap the cupboards
The family then had the coffin cremated and pretended to contain the body of their own family member.
The real body of the family member was then buried in secret in a traditional way.
After the disappearance of the victim in 2017, he was reported missing.
It took the police more than two years to discover the crime and track down the accused.
In September 2020, Huang was given a suspended death sentence against which he appealed.
It was finally rejected in December 2020 by the High Court in Guangdong and a suspended death sentence was upheld. This means that the sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment if he does not commit another offense after two years.
The family that hired Huang was convicted of insulting a corpse but was not jailed. It is unclear whether they should have paid a fine instead.
Last week, it published a news release featuring the victim’s family, giving the story a national platform.
China’s Funeral Campaign
A traditional funeral is favored in China, and people invest heavily in funerals and coffins, believing that it is a way to show piety towards their ancestors.
But China is increasingly pushing for people to bury their dead, and in some regions there is a total ban on funerals.
It is meant to save land and discourage excessive funeral ceremonies.
A regulation dating back to 1997 states that “densely populated regions with relatively little land and convenient transportation must practice cremation”.
“Regions that cannot meet such requirements may be buried,” the regulation reads.
Body exchanges are not unheard of in China, and occur mostly in rural areas where more people are emphasizing traditional funerals.