From the 1950s to the 1960s, China witnessed a significant transformation in private cemetery property rights. Historically, preceding the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the execution of land reform, the authorities implicitly sanctioned the transaction of lands designated for private cemeteries. The government upheld individual ownership or usufruct rights to these burial grounds, instilling confidence among Macao’s residents, who were under Portuguese colonial dominion, to buy or rent cemetery plots within mainland China. The onslaught of the Pacific War saw the Japanese military engulf vast stretches of Chinese territory, including the south, prompting a substantial exodus of city dwellers into Macao. This influx escalated the population to over quadruple its sustainable threshold, engendering a prolonged cemetery space crisis. Despite the cessation of hostilities in 1945 following Japan’s capitulation, Macao’s cemetery quandary persisted unabated.

Compelled by a chronic disregard from the Macao-Portuguese regime, Chinese clannish assemblies, benevolent entities, and mercantile syndicates were necessitated to secure burial sites beyond their confines for communal and public interment purposes. However, the subsequent ascendancy to power in CCP post-1950 and the advent of the “Land Reform” initiative saw the expropriation of these cemetery plots, previously procured by Macao’s organizations. Consequently, this marked the transition of Guangdong’s cemeterial landscape from privately owned dispersed rural graveyards to state-managed public cemeteries.