Sociological perspective

For Jing Jun, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, the questions about death began with a number.

Each year, around 10 million people die in China. That means at least 10 million families experience loss annually.

Since 2019, Jing and his research team — spanning more than a dozen universities — have been collecting their stories, assembling nearly 1,000 surveys and over 300 interviews to understand how death is actually experienced, rather than how it is imagined.

"What we have are narratives about how people describe the process, how they remember it," Jing said.

In the summer of 2025, Bringing Death Back into Life, an exhibition held in Beijing, spent two months stirring public discussion on the topic of mortality through artistic means.

The exhibition saw Jing provide academic backing, and he gave speeches during the event.

"One of the most immediate realities our research reveals is not ritual, but pressure," said Jing, whose new book, Chinese Narrative Death and Dying, will be released soon.

He mentioned that in more than 90 percent of families with cancer patients, the final months of life bring catastrophic medical expenses — costs that can exceed 40 percent of a household's income. The financial and emotional burdens remain very daunting.

Death, in today's China, is often entangled with the healthcare system — hospitals, treatments and decisions about how far to go in trying to turn the condition around.

Evolving ideas and practices regarding elderly healthcare have changed not only where people die — more often in hospitals, especially in large cities — but also how death is understood. It has become something to manage, to postpone, sometimes to resist or even ignore at all costs.

Despite the pressures of modern life, Jing found something that surprised him.

"In our research, we almost never saw people dying completely alone," he said.

Unlike in some societies where solitary deaths have become a social concern, China still maintains dense networks of care.

Even seniors living in rural areas, despite having children working in far-off cities, are rarely left entirely unattended.

Family, even as it changes, continues to anchor the experience of death.

If traditional Chinese values, shaped in part by Confucianism, emphasize filial piety — the duty of the young to care for the old — Jing's research suggests that, at the end of life, the direction of care often shifts.

He calls it "reverse care".

In many of the interviews, dying individuals were described as worrying less about themselves than about those around them. They comforted their children, reassured their families, and sometimes even made decisions to limit treatment in order to reduce financial or emotional burdens.

"One mother told her daughter she was happy that she had lived well. She was the one doing the comforting," Jing said.

This impulse — to care for others even at the moment of departure — resonates with older ideas, including those influenced by Buddhism, in which death is understood as a passage, and one's final state of mind carries meaning.

But it is also deeply practical, grounded in the realities of contemporary life.

For all its rituals, death in China often remains difficult to talk about directly. Families may avoid discussing diagnoses. Jing has seen how this can lead to regret — things left undone, words left unsaid.