Do the dead really move into the paper villas people burn for them? Probably not. If we’re going to be properly superstitious about it, then even among all this ritual logic, paper houses, paper cars, and stacks of oversized banknotes are supposedly useless anyway; only the gold ingots folded from foil would count as real currency in the afterlife.
That was the first thing that came to mind when I saw a strangely captivating news item: in Nantong during Qingming, some families were burning giant paper castles for the deceased, structures so large they took up half a street. Whether the dead can feel any of that is unclear. The living, though, definitely can. The spectacle is impossible to miss.
I’ve never really been a supporter of burning paper offerings. Whenever I visit graves with family, I joke that if you keep sending down hundreds of billions in paper cash, inflation must already be out of control down there. But the bigger reason is simpler. In cemeteries, paper is usually burned in shared public spaces. Sometimes strangers burn theirs right beside yours. And then what gets burned, and how much gets burned, starts turning into the real entertainment.
One family burns the old-style spirit money. Another brings notes from the "Bank of Heaven and Earth" with absurd face values in the hundreds of billions. This year someone starts burning a paper house; next year someone else upgrades to a paper Rolls-Royce. Once Qingming offerings stop being for the dead and become a game performed for the living, the inevitable final boss appears: the luxury paper mansion.
When people are still alive, competing over who is more filial is difficult. Once they are dead, though, filial piety becomes a yearly contest, and Qingming is its biggest arena.
A few days ago I saw something similar in a completely different setting. Before a parent-teacher meeting, a teacher had students write letters to their parents. During the meeting, each parent would sit at their child’s desk and open the letter there. One parent filmed the moment on a phone. Looking around, they captured other parents unfolding pages and pages of heartfelt writing from their children. Some were visibly moved, even trembling slightly as they read.
Then the camera turned back to the letter in that parent’s own hands.
It contained only two smiley faces.
And in that one shot, the whole truth of the exercise was exposed. The letter wasn’t really for the parent. It was part of a competition in filial performance. The gratitude produced by this sort of moral education is so standardized that even the punctuation tends to match. That final symbol of deep, heartfelt thanks is usually an exclamation mark.
Within such a template, two smiley faces look almost rebellious. But of course, we can’t know what that child was actually thinking. I only know that when I was younger, I refused to write this kind of performative letter myself. When the teacher asked why, my excuse was: I haven’t done anything wrong lately, so there’s no need for self-criticism. The teacher couldn’t really argue with that, but made sure to shut me down before anyone else copied me. In the end I even left my weekly journal on the desk, just in case my mother felt awkward seeing that every other parent had received a moving “gratitude letter.”
When everyone is using the same script to compete in filial devotion, the length of the writing matters, yes—but the more important variable is how well the other lead actor performs.
There’s another scene that works by the same logic. A mother sits in the stands at a football match, watching her son play. He finally scores. The crowd erupts. She bursts into tears, sobbing openly, drawing every eye around her: “That’s my son! That’s my son!”
Now imagine removing the entire crowd and leaving her alone in the stadium. Would the result be exactly the same?
No one can prove another person’s inner motive from the outside. But psychology offers a rather uncomfortable and very plausible guess: self-sanctification. In other words, a person uses some external figure or event as a contrast that elevates their own character, feelings, or conduct into something morally luminous.
This does not mean the emotion itself is fake. Self-sanctification does not cancel sincerity; it breaks sincerity down into components. It is usually unconscious. More often than not, it functions as a psychological defense mechanism, a reflex built into the mind. At best, what we can do is examine ourselves a little. We cannot really prevent the mechanism from arising.
Take a common example. When someone complains to you after a breakup, why do they spend so much time listing the other person’s faults? Why do they almost always place themselves in the role of the victim and narrate everything that happened to them as suffering endured? Because they are self-sanctifying. They are searching for the most useful external explanation in order to avoid being consumed by self-reproach. That’s how the old saying works: if you repeat a lie often enough, eventually you can convince yourself. Even if they had their own flaws in the relationship, those flaws shrink beside the other person’s betrayal or indifference.
There is a passage that explains this tendency with uncomfortable precision:
Chinese people do not treat their wrongdoing as the result of their own free will, but rather as something that runs against their consciousness and their "true heart," and they believe that if one acts according to one’s true heart, virtue will naturally follow. Thus this kind of repentance never touches the true heart itself.
Strictly speaking, traditional Chinese culture has never possessed a genuine and thorough consciousness of repentance. What it has instead is a kind of self-cultivation based on guarding one’s presumed original moral core and preventing problems before they arise. It is not a total reflection on one’s own actions combined with responsibility for them, but a habit of attributing wrongdoing to accidental external disturbance.
Therefore repentance often rests on self-advertisement, much like the imperial “edicts of self-reproach” occasionally issued by emperors in dynastic history: what appears to be confession becomes a display of one’s benevolent heart and selfless character, and the more severe the self-accusation, the greater the boast concealed within it.
— Dance of the Soul, Deng Xiaomang
When I was in middle school writing self-criticism assignments, I gradually discovered the trick behind them. Repentance, very often, means trying as hard as possible to locate the one horseshoe nail that made Napoleon fall from his horse. Whether that nail is the decisive objective fact hardly matters. The original intention must remain noble, but somewhere in the chain there must be a butterfly whose tiny disturbance led to the worst outcome. That is the practical method of self-sanctification.
Apply that logic elsewhere and everything becomes clearer. Suppose a paper mansion causes a fire during Qingming. The original intention was filial piety. Since filial piety itself cannot be the cause of the fire, the butterfly must be a gust of wind. Before the fire comes filial devotion, and it remains morally untouchable.
Even when no formal “repentance procedure” is involved, the same rules still govern self-moved emotion: the more intensely one is moved by oneself, the higher the level of display.
As long as the paper house I bought is big enough, my filial piety becomes an all-purpose shield. At the parent-teacher meeting, once I confirm my child’s letter is the longest around, I had better raise it a little higher so other parents can see how “filial” my child is. A mother cries for her son on the football field and makes sure the surrounding audience notices. After a breakup, the ex becomes a monster who nearly ruined my life, while I present myself as magnanimous enough to forgive them and still hope they improve.
Look a little more carefully, and you start to notice that behind these scenes of self-generated emotion there is often a specific form of confession waiting in the background.
That, however, is another subject.