WANG TINGYU points sadly towards the space above her bed where her coffin used to lie. It was one of a pair she and her husband bought 20 years ago, when the couple entered their 60s. After he died, hers remained stored in the eaves of their sooty cottage—ready for the day her own body would be buried on a nearby hillside. But a few months ago officials entered the home of the 81-year-old and took the casket away. She says the 1,000 yuan ($145) they gave her in compensation was one-half to one-third of its value.

The distress of Ms Wang (not her real name) is shared by neighbours in her village bordered by bright-green rice fields in Shangrao, a prefecture in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi. They say that this summer officials went door-to-door collecting the coffins that elderly residents had purchased and put aside, as is often the custom in rural areas—expensive ones are sometimes displayed as status symbols (coffins confiscated in Shangrao are pictured). The officials piled up the caskets and had them crushed with a mechanical digger. They claimed that the pieces would be burned to generate power. State media said that villagers had willingly handed over their coffins. Locals dispute this. “People are outraged,” says one.

Efforts by the Chinese government to dissuade people from burying the dead have a long history. After the fall of the last imperial dynasty in 1911 reformers advocated cremation, believing that it symbolised modernity. That view was shared by Mao, who argued that coffin-making was a waste of wood and money and that elaborate burials fostered superstition (ironically, his embalmed body now lies in a glass sarcophagus in central Beijing). During the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61 graveyards in Shanghai were turned over to pigs, notes Natacha Aveline-Dubach of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. In the 1960s and 1970s gravestones were fashioned into kitchen counters and floor tiles.

Mao’s successors inherited his misgivings about burial. They had another fear, too: that the practice could result in arable land becoming even more scarce and thus impair China’s ability to feed its rapidly growing population. The one-child-per-couple policy, introduced in 1979, aimed to reduce the burden of sustaining so many people by curbing the number entering the world. Anti-burial measures, though less nationally co-ordinated, were intended to prevent those departing this world from hogging badly needed land.

Between 1986 and 2005 China’s national cremation rate rose steadily, from 26% of corpses to 53% (see chart). In big cities, which grew quickly over that period, cremation is now nearly universal—in cramped urban areas economics, as much as diktat, has helped to determine how to deal with the dead. Since then, however, there has been little further change. Many villagers still bury bodies, not just on hard-to-farm hillsides but on fertile fields. Since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, officials have stepped up their anti-burial efforts. In 2014 the government said it wanted the cremation rate to grow by up to 1% annually for the rest of the decade, with “close to 100%” cremation in selected areas. It has been trying harder to promote “ecoburials”. These can involve ashes being packed into tall columbaria, buried in flower beds or sprinkled into the sea. The confrontations in Jiangxi occurred after several of its counties said they would allow no more burials after the end of August. Videos on social media showed old people lying in their coffins to stop officials from seizing the caskets. The intensified campaign involves more than the usual worries about the scarcity of farmland. The government believes that lavish spending on coffins and mourning rituals, in order to show off the popularity or status of the deceased, is frustrating its effort to eradicate rural poverty by 2020 (in January the Ministry of Culture announced that it would clamp down more firmly on funeral organisers who hire strippers to boost turnout). Officials also want to “beautify” the countryside to attract tourists. They think, with some justification, that rich city-slickers find graves spooky and unsightly. Villagers allege that local authorities sometimes grab burial land in order to replace fields which officials have sold to developers. In the past three years there has been a slight uptick in the cremation rate. But anti-burial campaigns have had grim side-effects. In 2014 several pensioners in Anhui province were reported by state media to have killed themselves shortly before a no-burial policy was due to take effect. They wanted to ensure that their remains would not be cremated—keeping the body intact is considered by some Chinese to be a sign of respect for one’s ancestors. The same year two officials in the southern province of Guangdong were alleged by police to have hired a grave-robber to exhume more than 20 corpses from a neighbouring province. The officials then had the bodies burned in order to help them meet cremation-rate targets, the attainment of which had been frustrated by surreptitious burials. This was not an isolated incident. Officials’ benefits and promotions were sometimes linked to meeting such targets, encouraging a furtive trade in bodies. The problem was said to be so prevalent that villagers in some areas took to camping by relatives’ tombs to protect them.

Urban officials have remained as reluctant as ever to allocate land for funeral use, even for the burial of ashes. So space is at a premium. Bloomberg, a news agency, calculates that last year the price per square metre of an urban burial plot sold by Fu Shou Yuan, a high-end undertaker, was more than 112,000 yuan ($16,000). It reckons this was double the cost per square metre of an apartment in Shenzhen, an expensive city in Guangdong.

In contrast with the one-child policy, about which the government brooked no criticism when it was in force, state media have attacked the excesses of the anti-burial campaign. Newspapers have variously described the coffin seizures in Jiangxi as “barbaric”, “inhuman” and “unlawful”. The government prefers to highlight more sensitive methods that are being tried in some regions. Wenling, a city in the coastal province of Zhejiang, said this year that it would award monthly stipends of between 100 and 400 yuan ($15-60) to pensioners who commit to having their ashes scattered at sea. Some other places in Zhejiang and elsewhere promise to cover the cremation and funeral costs of villagers.

Optimists hope that a clause soon to be inserted into China’s funeral regulations, emphasising the need to respect the “dignity” of citizens, will discourage abuses. In 2012 the law was tweaked to make it clearer that no force should be used to promote cremation. Officials clearly found that easy to ignore. Having already suffered the loss of their treasured coffins, the villagers in Jiangxi worry that they may now face another big bill if they want to have their ashes buried in their nearest public cemetery. Unlike the traditional hillside plot, it is a long drive away.