For most Chinese, the Qingming Festival—observed each early spring—is a time for revisiting the past, where families gather to honor deceased loved ones.

However, for a small tribe of Chinese youths, this year's Qingming Festival, which fell on April 4, was also the year's busiest internship season, a time for charting a career path forward.

Hailing from the China Civil Affairs University (CCAU), which was inaugurated in Beijing in 2024, these youngsters are the country's first undergraduates majoring in modern funeral management.

Pang Lin is one of the 150 students who enrolled in the program last year. Like many of her peers, her decision to pursue a college degree in funeral services met with fierce opposition from her family and friends, who would rather she endure the stress and stigma that come with retaking the college entrance examination than enter a profession so intimately tied to death.

Undeterred, Pang enrolled anyway. For her—and for a growing number of young Chinese—the funeral industry is no longer a last resort. Instead, it is an honorable profession, a passion and, in a rapidly aging society, the future.

Majoring in mortality 

Few cultures like to talk about death and in China, the subject has long remained a deep-seated taboo.

Therefore, it was all the more surprising that after the CCAU launched the country's first bachelor's degree in modern funeral management in June 2024, competition for admission was fierce.

A shockwave swept through Chinese social media, as the admission score for the course turned out to be 20 to 30 points higher than that of other undergraduate programs at the university, with the highest score reaching 601 out of 750—a mark high enough to secure a spot in more "decent" majors at esteemed universities. 

When asked why she chose this field of study, Chen Xuetong, who scored 601, said she first warmed to the idea after discovering an influencer who worked as a mortuary makeup artist, whose humorous take on her job completely changed her perception of the profession. Still, it was eventually the promise of good employment that got her family on board.

Strong job prospects are a key driver behind the recent surge of interest in funeral management studies.

China's population fell for the third year in a row in 2024, as deaths continued to outpace births, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. Meanwhile, the population aged 60 and above topped 310 million last year—just a few percentage short of a quarter of the national total and an increase from nearly 297 million recorded in 2023.

"As we face the realities of an aging population head-on, we must address not only how people should age, but also how their final stretch of life is managed," Xu Xiaoling, Associate Dean of the CCAU School of Life Culture, which oversees the program, told Beijing Review.

Despite the soaring demand for after-death care, the industry struggles with an acute staff shortage. As of this January, only nine higher vocational colleges nationwide offered training in funeral services, Youth.cn, a Chinese news portal, reported. Some 1,000 students graduate from these programs each year, while around 10,000 vacancies are waiting to be filled at funeral homes nationwide.

Additionally, the bar has also been raised for the qualifications a mortician must now possess, as what was once a purely technical trade has evolved into a deeply human-centered profession.

This shift is best reflected in the highly multidisciplinary design of the CCAU program, which covers everything from anatomy, mortuary makeup, funeral planning, psychology and philosophy, to the history of Chinese funerary traditions.

A walk through the program's many training labs confirms just how diversified and all-encompassing the curriculum is. Alongside conventional spaces for funeral rehearsals, cremation practice and mortuary cosmetics training, the program also features a death simulation center, where students experience, through specialized equipment, the physical sensation of suffocation in the final moments before death.

Some students scream, while others sit in stunned silence. "It was surprisingly quiet," Pang recalled. As the machine tightened around her, she felt neither fear nor panic—only serenity.

While reactions vary, nearly all leave with a renewed respect for life and a deeper understanding of the weight their future profession carries.

"Many students enter the program with only a vague grasp of mortality," Xu said. "The death simulation center was created to offer a visceral encounter with death, prepare them for grief counseling and end-of-life care, and help them better connect with the human side of their profession."

Talking taboo 

While the lure of stable careers is definitely a pulling factor drawing many to the course, the newfound interest for the funeral industry among young Chinese also reflects a broader societal shift toward a more open confrontation with the end of life.

In recent years, Chinese films centered on the funeral industry, including Lighting Up the Star and The Last Dance, became unexpected smash hits at the domestic box office.

Social media shorts revealing the day-to-day work of funeral professionals, including the one that prompted Chen to study funeral management, regularly attract millions of views.

Even prime-time television is in on the act: On a recent variety show, a man who has been working in the funeral industry for 38 years staged his own mock funeral, which sparked a heated public debate on the many stereotypes that still haunt the

sector.

"In China, things are starting to change—people are talking more openly about death and there's a growing acceptance of the funeral profession," Xu said, adding that, while six students eventually did not enter the program due to family disapproval, those who enrolled show a genuine passion for the work.

The modern afterlife 

As cultural attitudes toward death continue to shift, China's funeral industry is also undergoing a quiet revolution, by which people are moving away from traditional funeral and burial rituals and embracing new practices and philosophies of death.

On March 25, 38 bereaved families from Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, gathered in Zhoushan, another city in the province, for a collective sea burial during which the ashes of their loved ones were sprinkled into the sea—not with joss paper, but with flower petals.

"Sea burial is not just a farewell, but also a celebration of life and a gift to those who come after us," Jiang Yan, who had just lost her husband, said at the event.

In recent years, green burials—where ashes are scattered or biodegradable urns are placed beneath trees, on lawns, in flowerbeds or at sea—have become popular alternatives to traditional burials in public cemeteries.

"It is not just about how the deceased is buried. In fact, sustainability has permeated every aspect of our course and the industry at large," Xu said, noting that simple ceremonies are replacing lavish displays, whereas spiritual remembrance is gradually replacing material offerings.

A major engine driving the industry's green transformation is technology. From 3D-printed biodegradable urns and smart, eco-friendly cremation systems to virtual memorial halls and the collection of photos, social media posts and other online assets of the deceased, the digital age is profoundly redefining how memories are preserved.

With rapid advances in AI, people are also turning to "AI resurrection," which uses deep learning and voice-cloning technologies to create digital incarnations of the deceased, as a means to maintain conversations with their loved ones and help heal their grief.

These trends were also built into the CCAU's funeral management program. It has a special hall dedicated to training students in digital memorial services. Surrounded by electronic screens on all four sides, onto which AI avatars of the deceased and their digital legacies are projected, the room provides a space where the bereaved can share the life stories of the departed and pass on family narratives for future generations.

However, while many embrace these shifts in funeral norms, others remain wary. In some rural regions, grand funerals are still seen as proof of filial piety, and green burials are dismissed as disrespectful; legal guidelines for inheriting digital legacies are yet to be established; and the unauthorized "AI resurrection" of public figures has sparked fierce debate over whether the technology comforts the bereaved or deepens their sorrow.

For Xu, while tackling these challenges requires the coordinated and sustained efforts of all sectors of society, education has a central role to play in slowly resolving these issues.

A degree in funeral management is not merely about the technical aspects of burial or cremation, but also about spreading a new culture of death dedicated to sustaining the dignity of the dead while acknowledging the needs of the living, she concluded.

(Print edition title: A Future in Farewells) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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