Partially Cremated Remains Left on Road Trigger Alarm Amid China’s Spiraling COVID Outbreak

A coffin is loaded from a hearse into a storage container at the Dongjiao crematorium and funeral home, one of several in the city that handles COVID-19 cases, in Beijing on Dec. 18, 2022. (Getty Images)

On the side of a road near a Chinese funeral home, where plumes of black smoke billow out, lay a pile of charred remains—both ashes and bones.

They were found next to the Henan Zhumadian Funeral House in central China.

“Look at these bones, they aren’t fully burned yet, even some spinal bones are here,” a man said while filming a video that circulated on Chinese social media. He spoke in the local dialect, lowering the camera for a closer look at the pile before turning to reveal a large gray compound that is the funeral facility.

The video, which doesn’t reveal the identity of the deceased, has emerged at a sensitive time as COVID-19 engulfs China, inundating both the country’s fragile health system and crematoriums. The Chinese regime, meanwhile, is facing growing criticism over its refusal to provide accurate figures on infections and deaths from the virus.

Henan, the province where the video originated, is particularly hard hit. Officials on Jan. 9 said that about 89 percent of the local population—about 88 million people—had contracted the virus.

Relatives carry the ashes of a loved one cremated at the Sipsongpanna Zhou Funeral house in Jinghong City, at Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, in China's Yunnan Province, on Jan. 10, 2023. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

The situation isn’t looking any better elsewhere in the country. Zhang Wenhong, a prominent Chinese doctor and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chief at the infectious disease department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, earlier estimated that the national infection rate would reach 80 percent with the coming of the Chinese New Year, which typically sets off the world’s biggest human migration for family reunions.

It’s unclear whether the bones are of a person or people who died because of COVID-19, and what the reason was for their disposal in that manner. A worker from the funeral facility, who was reached by The Epoch Times on Jan. 5, appeared to be on high alert and quickly hung up the phone when asked about the video. The facility was running on a packed schedule through Jan. 8, the worker said.

In response to the video, the city’s civil affairs bureau confirmed that it was “aware of the matter and is taking care of it,” according to Chinese media.

A nearby funeral business, without directly commenting on the video, told The Epoch Times that such a thing doesn’t occur at its facility.

Mourners gather outside the memorial halls for the deceased at a funeral home in Shanghai on Dec. 31, 2022. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

COVID Toll Questioned

The regime has continued to defend its pandemic response even as countries and analysts cast doubt over its data.

“We believe that the current numbers being published from China underrepresent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, particularly in terms of death,” Mike Ryan, World Health Organization (WHO) emergencies director, told reporters at a Jan. 4 media briefing, adding that Beijing’s definition of COVID-19 deaths is “very narrow.”

China’s criteria for classifying fatalities as COVID-19 deaths only allow for deaths that involve pneumonia or respiratory failure sparked by COVID-19, in contrast with the WHO’s guidance to report a death as COVID-19-related if the virus “caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.”

According to official data, China maintains one of the lowest death tolls in the world. But the regime’s consistent downplaying of its infection rates over the course of the pandemic, the waves of deaths among public figures and celebrities in the past few weeks, and the struggles of crematoriums nonetheless indicate a vastly higher death toll.

People wait for a funeral service for their deceased relatives at Baoxing Funeral Parlor in Shanghai on Jan. 4, 2023. (Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images)

A former official from the central Chinese city of Xi’an told The Epoch Times that some crematoriums were so overwhelmed in his area that they were sending bodies to nearby facilities.

A woman from Anshan, an industrial city in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning, heard that several of her friends had lost their fathers in recent days. One of them, who was nearly 80, died after becoming infected just before the new year. His family was told there was a line of more than 1,200 ahead of them waiting for cremation. The cause of death on the death certificate was listed as severe pneumonia with no mention of COVID-19.

The woman, who gave only her surname, Sun, for fear of reprisals, speculated that the regime has given orders barring hospitals from attributing deaths to COVID-19 to “prevent the outside world from knowing the true death figure.”

“The doctor definitely can’t write COVID-19 pneumonia,” Sun told The Epoch Times. “How many deaths have the authorities reported? Hardly any. But you can figure it out by just looking at crematories everywhere. The deaths are far from a small number.”

Hong Ning contributed to this report.