SOMETIMES you have to be cruel to be kind.

That’s the thinking behind a decision by Chinese fishermen who demanded money from a grieving couple in exchange for removing their son’s floating corpse from a river.

Deng Shuchao threw himself from a bridge into the Jinsha River near his home in Panzhihua in China’s Sichuan Province on November 30. Deng, a taxi driver, ended his life three days before his body was found, according to the South China Morning Post.

But when the time came to retrieve the young man’s body, which was tethered to a rock metres from shore, the family and the fishermen reached a stalemate.

The family could not touch the body themselves because it is deemed unlucky to do so. And the fishermen would not pull it to shore without a “finder’s fee” of 18,000 yuan ($AU3850), an amount the parents said they could not afford.

For three days the family waited on the river bank and begged the fishermen to do the right thing. Photographs show them crying and staring out at the water.

Police intervened, the Post reported, and convinced the family to borrow money from relatives before the 25-year-old’s body was finally brought to shore.

Deng’s father told local newspaper West China City Daily he begged to no avail. He said the fishermen were determined to receive payment for the trouble of salvaging the corpse.

“There were six fishermen. I pleaded with them, cried and offered them 200 yuan each. But they still rejected me,” he said.

Jiang Jian, a law professor at Sichuan Normal University, told the Chengdu Business Daily that asking money to retrieve a dead body was not a criminal offence. He said it could not be deemed blackmail because technically they were doing the bereaved parents a favour.

China Daily wrote this week that the fishermen acted immorally but police should accept some of the moral outrage, too.

“The root cause of the problem is the absence of this public service,” the opinion piece read.

“When a government does not help recover a body, there are those who will try and make money from people’s desire to say goodbye and send off their loved ones with a funeral.

“Worse, when the police finally arrived, they “negotiated” for a discount instead of providing the help the couple needed. They are well-trained and fully capable of retrieving the body from water but they simply did not do that. They bear some of the moral blame.”

Negotiating the retrieval of corpses is nothing new in China. The BBC reported in 2010 that corpse-fishers were making good money fishing for bodies on China’s Yellow River.

A 55-year-old man named Wei Xinpeng said at the time he had collected more than 500 bodies which he sold back to families for a fee. Some of those were drowning victims, others had committed suicide.

“I bring dignity to the dead,” he said. For him, it was also personal: his son had drowned in the river and nobody ever found his corpse.

“It was very painful. That’s why I started doing this job.”

The Global Times reported three college students drowned in 2009 in Hubei Province while saving two boys from a river. Fishermen found their bodies and demanded their classmates pay to have them removed from the water.

English-language Chinese news site Sina reported a couple drowned in 2013 in Zhejiang Province. On that occasion, salvagers demanded a sum of money from local residents for returning the corpses to shore.