The COVID-19 pandemic presents many challenges, including how to handle Taiwanese businesspeople living in China who want to return to Taiwan for Tomb Sweeping Day, also known as the Qingming Festival.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, has said, citing information from the Straits Exchange Foundation, that many businesspeople are not keen to return, because they must undergo 14 days of home quarantine.
Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) has said that, to prevent the spread of the disease, more people are interested in “online tomb sweeping” to pay their respects to their ancestors without having to go to the actual site of the tomb.
This outbreak presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the holiday.
The long Qingming Festival weekend is a relatively new invention. Traditionally, the holiday fell on the third day of the third lunar month, and families would arrange a time for tomb sweeping duties prior to that date. This is why there was no sudden rush of crowds descending on cemeteries.
After Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) passed away, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) encouraged people to observe Qingming and set a new date for it, changing it from the original lunar calendar date to April 5, the day of Chiang’s death.
This is why there is an old and a new tomb sweeping day. The change was intended to commemorate the “glorious leader” at the same time that people paid respects to their own deceased relatives. The holiday was later combined with a long weekend, and came to be associated with large crowds and traffic jams.
Qingming also became a part of the KMT regime’s indoctrination of Taiwanese.
From the political elite attending public memorials at the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in China to the tomb sweeping custom among ordinary people, the ultimate goal was to foster a connection between an ethnic group and families within that group, to foster ideals of loyalty and filial piety, and to form an unbreakable hold over racial identity and moral principle.
Through commemoration and veneration of the forbears of the family line, descendants would pay careful attention to their parents’ funerary rites to give them a strong sense of belonging, and this would create the moral ties to facilitate governance and rule over the country.
Fabricated lineages would, in turn, be used to control Taiwanese relations and strengthen the Chinese identity among Pingpu Aborigines.
The Democratic Progressive Party government should consider decoupling Qingming from the commemoration of Chiang’s death and, in the interests of transitional justice and fostering a Taiwanese identity, restore the original customs of the holiday.
It should also abolish the long holiday weekend, allowing Taiwanese to choose when to pay their respects to their ancestors in the two-month period between the end of the Lunar New Year break and the lunar Qingming.
This would not only address the problem of long traffic jams on freeways during the long weekend, it would also divest this simple ancestor worship festival of its political baggage.
Chen Ching-kuen is an assistant professor.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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