People gathered in tribute to the fallen ahead of Tomb Sweeping Day

It was a rainy day, but the martyrs' cemetery in Yanjin county, Xinxiang, Henan province, was full of tourists.

There were locals and also visitors from other cities, some of them from Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, more than 3,000 kilometers away.

Xiao Siyuan, a 24-year-old soldier with the People's Liberation Army who was killed during the Sino-Indian border clash in June, rests permanently in the cemetery.

According to the PLA Daily, Xiao's job was to video the process of the PLA persuading foreign troops to leave the area. However, when his comrades were attacked by a large force, Xiao rushed forward and tried to protect them from stones and clubs with his own body.

The foreign troops were defeated and fled as PLA reinforcements arrived, but Xiao and three comrades－Wang Zhuoran, Chen Xiangrong and Chen Hongjun－died. Their regimental commander, Qi Fabao, was left unconscious with a bad head wound.

Xiao's remains were sent to his hometown and buried in the martyrs' cemetery on June 30.

In Luohe, a city in Henan, Wang's grave in the municipal martyrs' cemetery is visited every day.

However, his parents have not told his 74-year-old grandmother about his death, so she still expects him to come home.

The youngest of the four, Chen Xiangrong, was 19 when he died. He is buried in his hometown of Pingnan county, Southeast China's Fujian province.

Chen Hongjun was buried in the martyrs' cemetery in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province. Recently, the graveyards were full of visitors who had come to pay tribute every day.

As Qingming Festival, or the Tomb Sweeping Day－a traditional time for people to visit ancestors' graves to pay their respects－approached, martyrs' cemeteries nationwide witnessed an influx of tourists paying tribute to those who died for the country.

Tradition

Since ancient times, China has honored those who sacrificed their lives for the public good. That tradition was inherited by the Communist Party of China soon after it was founded.

As early as the 1930s, the Red Army, a forerunner of the PLA and a revolutionary force under CPC command, built a martyrs' cemetery in Tongjiang, Sichuan province, to honor those who died during the Long March (1934-36).

In 1946, construction started on a martyrs' cemetery in Handan, Hebei province, to commemorate those who died during the revolution. Finished in 1950, it was the first such cemetery built after the People's Republic of China was founded.

By April 3, 2020, the number of memorial structures for martyrs had reached 4,200 nationwide.

The southernmost martyrs' cemetery is situated on Chenhang Island, Sansa city, Hainan province. Built in August 2016, it is a memorial to the 18 soldiers who died in the 1974 Battle of the Xisha Islands, during which they defeated troops from what was then South Vietnam.

The cemetery has 18 nameplates for martyrs, and six in memory of the ships that participated in the battle. It is also an education center, and every new soldier comes to pay tribute when arriving on the island.

Kangxiwar Martyrs' Cemetery, located 4,280 meters above sea level in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is China's highest martyrs' cemetery. It was built in 1965 to commemorate 83 martyrs who died in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Now, 108 martyrs rest there. There are also gravestones for the four martyrs who died in the border clash in June, who were later moved to their hometowns.

There are even cemeteries for Chinese martyrs overseas. In Pyongannam-do, about 100 km east of Pyongyang in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, there is a cemetery for martyrs of the Chinese People's Volunteers who fought in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53). A total of 134 martyrs are buried there, including Mao Anying, the first son of Mao Zedong, the founding Chairman of the PRC.

Some martyrs' cemeteries were initially built for one person. On Feb 15, 1923, Shi Yang, a lawyer who fought for workers' rights, was arrested and killed by warlords who ruled large parts of Central China. Local workers buried him and built a graveyard to honor him. In 1953, a dedicated cemetery was built and opened to the public.

It should be noted that the martyrs' cemeteries honor more than just CPC martyrs. The Graveyard for National Heroes in Tengchong county, Southwest China's Yunnan province, is a typical example.

Built in 1945, it honors the Chinese forces that defeated Japanese troops during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and restored land transportation routes to Myanmar.

In 2011, the local government built a museum in the cemetery to honor that history.

Many martyrs' cemeteries have adopted the latest technologies to give visitors a more realistic sense of history. Longhua Martyrs' Cemetery, the largest of its kind in Shanghai, has developed an augmented reality game and posted the QR code on its official website.

Anyone who downloads the cemetery's app can start the game by scanning an artifact with their smartphone. In the game, one can see the history of the cemetery, including how it was built and how it evolved into today's edifice, and can participate in history by completing assignments in the game.

Online activities

As last year's Qingming fell during the COVID-19 epidemic, the Ministry of Veterans Affairs called on local governments to prevent mass gatherings by holding memorial activities online. Echoing that call, one cemetery after another opened social network accounts and held online activities.

On short-video platform Douyin there are about 200 registered accounts for martyrs' cemeteries, while on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like service, there are 36 full pages of accounts of registered martyrs' cemeteries. Through them, cemetery managements shared videos and showed livestreams of martyrs' graves.

This year, as the outbreak has been largely been brought under control, martyrs' cemeteries nationwide are open to tourists again, but the online activities remain in play.

In addition to physically building infrastructures to honor martyrs and heroes, China has also been legislating to protect them "spiritually" after a series of incidents.

On May 22, 2013, Sun Jie, a micro-blogger with 8.9 million followers, unveiled a post that compared Qiu Shaoyun, a soldier killed by fire bombs during the Korean conflict, to roasted meat. A similar comparison was made about Lai Ning, a 15-year-old boy who died fighting a fire in Ya'an city, Sichuan, in 1988.

JiaDuoBao, a local canned tea drinks company, echoed Sun by saying they would give him 100,000 cans of a tea drink if he opened a barbeque outlet.

Both were sued by Qiu Shaohua, Qiu Shaoyun's younger brother, in 2015. A court in Beijing's Daxing district ruled that the defendants had to apologize and pay "spiritual damages" of 1 yuan (16 cents).

Although Sun's Weibo account was closed and he quickly disappeared from the platform, the incident prompted calls for a law to protect such figures. On April 27, 2018, the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress passed a law to protect heroes and martyrs, which came into effect on May 1 of that year.

Under the law, it is the responsibility of local governments, enterprises, schools and the army to hold memorial activities for martyrs during festivals such as Qingming.

The name and fame of heroes and martyrs are also better protected. Anyone who abuses them faces punishment and penalties.

From March 1, an amendment to the criminal law clearly states that it is a crime to slander martyrs and heroes. Yet that does not mean those who committed the deed before that date can escape criminal penalties.

On Feb 19, Qiu Ziming, a veteran micro-blogger, wrote a piece attacking Qi, the commander in last year's border clash. He was arrested the next day on suspicion of the crime of "seeking trouble".

There was such a strong wave of anger that Pan Rui, a 30-year-old who spread rumors about the PLA during the border clash in June, was the subject of an arrest warrant on March 15.

As complaints poured in against Pan and Qiu, there was also a wave of commemorations for the martyrs on domestic social networks.

On the day their deaths were made public, a poem went viral online:

"I sat at the table/cola in hand/wondering why the young soldiers died/

Late at night I realized/they died so we could live better."

Shi Baoyin and the publicity departments of Luohe city and Yanjin county contributed to this story.