Mingbi (China)

Mingbi 🇨🇳
Location: China
Definition: Confucian practices of ancestor worship require the material transfer
Keywords: China – The paper offerings – Joss paper – USA
Clusters: Confucian practices
Author: Yizhou Xu
Affiliation: Old Dominion University, USA

By Yizhou Xu, Alumnus, Old Dominion University, USA

The Chinese term mingbi (冥币) stands for the burning of paper offerings as part of mourning. The practice occupies a significant role in directing the everyday social and spiritual life in China. Each year, during Tomb Sweeping Day (Qingming Festival), millions of people travel to cemeteries across the country to venerate their ancestors through the ritual of paper burning. The paper offerings, more colloquially known as ‘spirit money’ or ‘joss paper’, are paper replicas of items such as money, houses, or furniture, as well as modern everyday possessions like cars, laptops, cameras and iPhones. The offerings are burned and ritually destroyed as a form of symbolic offering to the dead. Paper burning is often performed at cemeteries and other venues of remembrance as a way of communicating with the deceased. With the adoption of the internet and digital technologies in China, the use of joss paper and other forms of ritual tribute have migrated online (Xu 2022). It has become a popular means of fulfilling one’s filial obligations with the convenience of digital platforms and without the need to travel to physical cemeteries.

Confucian practices of ancestor worship require the material transfer of food, money and other items to the deceased, often in the form of joss paper items, ritually burned as a means of communicating with the spirit world. The perennial practices of ancestor worship are the bond that unite families and clans as the basis for sociality in Chinese society and an inseparable part of Chinese identity. ‘Death does not terminate the relationship of reciprocity among the Chinese, it simply transforms these ties and often makes them stronger’ (Watson and Rawski 1988: 9). In this regard, Chinese eschatological practices represent a radical break from the Western notions of the afterlife. In contrast to the linear or teleological view in Abrahamic religions, the Chinese traditions have a unitary and cyclical view of the world. Rather than having a clear distinction between the material and the immaterial world, life and death in China exist in parallel. This is reflected by the binary worldview of the yin-yang.

Paper burning can also be considered a type of spiritual gift exchange linked to the traditional practices of ancestor worship that are a crucial part of the Chinese conception of the afterlife. Accordingly, death does not sever the social obligation between family and clans but extends into a cult of lineage worship (Jankowiak 1993) that is reciprocated through mortuary rituals. Central to the perpetuation of Chinese sociality into the afterlife is the exchange of spiritual gifts in the forms of joss paper items and money. These items signify the ritualistic bridging of two worlds by which spiritual gifts are rendered immaterial through its ritual destruction. In exchange, people receive good blessings from their ancestors, creating a reciprocal relationship of material/immaterial gift exchange, maintained by every generation.

The continuity between afterlife and social life is also closely tied to the roles of the traditional Chinese state and its governing bodies. Both worlds share similar functions to that of the state bureaucracy, in that the afterworld contains parallel bureaucratic organs that mirrors society. Paper offerings of imitation money were some of the earliest manifestations of joss paper, despite having no standard design. The imitation money exists in a huge range of styles and denominations, always depicting authorities and institutions governing the afterlife. Joss paper notes, often called ‘hell notes’ are issued by the ‘Bank of Hell’, which references the Chinese term for the netherworld, difu, ruled by King Yan and other deities of the Chinese religious pantheon.

The parallel existence of state apparatuses denotes the inseparability of the afterlife with that of the living governance. In drawing from the Foucauldian notions of biopolitics, Mayfair Yang points to the complexity by which power is distributed across different mediums of economic exchange in China, specifically ‘(1) the state distributive economy, (2) the gift economy, and (3) resurgent commodity economy’ (Yang 1994: 178). The ritual gift economy in this case constitutes what Yang calls minjian, the people’s realm that operates in tandem with, but is distinct from, the logic of the state and market economy. Gift exchange in the form of guanxi, the cultivation of personal relationships, makes up a significant portion of the contemporary cultural and political economy of China. China’s biopolitical governance provides a useful way of thinking about how the state-distributed economy works in controlling social life. It also inversely implies that minjian can be applied to the Chinese concept of yinjian, the nether-realm, in looking at gift exchange beyond the mere circuits of exchange in the living context and demonstrating its necropolitical implications.

In recent years the Chinese government has heavily promoted the digitisation of paper burning rituals via online cemeteries to adopt more sustainable mourning practices. These so-called ‘green funeral practices’ discourage traditional rituals of paper burning, firecrackers and food offerings, to curb air pollution and waste from burning. Instead, there have been renewed calls to adopt online practices that substitute traditional joss paper with digital gifts that can be purchased and shared on online virtual cemeteries. This effectively reframes the practices of mourning into productive acts by which users must work to turn material objects into digital imitations to be accumulated and shared online. As a result, the practices of ancestor worship and private mourning are gradually being replaced by the notions of preservation, memorialisation and public ceremony. The traditional ritual gift economy is increasingly subsumed by the formal digital commodity economy. Digital platforms work to rematerialize the ephemerality of the gift into new spheres of socioeconomic exchange, deemed productive to the interest of the state.

The state’s intervention in traditional rituals is not surprising, as paper burning had long been categorized as a form of mixin, or superstition, and was seen as a backward, counterrevolutionary activity (Chu 2010: 182). But since the market reform of the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of folk religions and traditional practices. These are often tolerated but remain illicit and unsanctioned by the state and local authorities. The state’s promotion of modern mortuary practices via online commemoration signifies the removal of traditional filial ties and the waste associated with paper gifts, while promoting a collective public memorialisation. The platformisation of mourning and its promotion by the state can be viewed as a means of regulating and standardizing an aesthetic practice that is commensurate with what the Chinese government views as a modern, clean and civilized society. Such discourses in official policy can be considered as a form of ‘aesthetic governmentality’ (Gherther 2015). In the case of China, individuals are conditioned to practice proper funereal conduct that is sanitized as opposed to unsightly, and productive as opposed to destructive.

Yet the remediation of material practices into the online realm also necessitates new ways of reifying corporeal practices vis-a-vis the digitisation process. The transformation of paper imitation into digital imitations requires a different mean of thinking about what constitutes materiality within this new online space of ritualized mourning. Online cemeteries therefore serve as the site of exchange by which joss paper and other votive offerings are digitized in ways that alter Chinese traditional practices. The digitisation of joss paper demonstrates the biopolitical means by which the state and market forces work to subsume traditional ancestor worship into controllable and commodifiable forms of mourning. The subversive acts of waste and destruction of the gift is replaced by its accumulation and preservation online. Digitisation highlights the process by which otherwise dead objects take on a different materiality, and different values, aesthetics and productive labor practices.

References

Chu, J.Y 2010. Cosmologies of credit: transnational mobility and the politics of destination in China. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ghertner, A. 2015. Rule by aesthetics. World-class city making in Delhi. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jankowiak, W.R. 1993. Sex, death, and hierarchy in a Chinese city: An anthropological account. New York: Columbia University Press.

Watson, J.L. and Rawski, E.S. 1988. Death ritual in late imperial and modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Xu, Y. 2022. ‘Digitizing death: commodification of joss paper on Chinese online cemetery’. Journal of Cultural Economy 15(2): 151-167.

Yang, M.M. 1994. Gifts, favors, and banquets: The art of social relationships in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.