Lack of law detailing liability for body retrieval results in extortion

[Image by Wang Xiaoying/China Daily]

DENG SHUCHAO, a resident of Panzhihua city, Southwest China's Sichuan province, committed suicide by jumping into the Yangtze River on Nov 30. Some fishermen found his body on Dec 3 but asked for 18,000 yuan ($2,800) from his parents for its recovery. His parents could not afford that, and the body was left in water for three days until the police negotiated a discount. The local government should provide such aid and services, says a comment on Beijing News:

Many people have blamed the fishermen for acting immorally. That accusation is correct because they did act immorally. When the boy's parents were weeping at the riverside, the fishermen added to their woe by asking for money to recover the body.

But the moral blame is rather empty because there is no law requiring them to do so without payment and moral blame alone won't change their attitude. Where was the local government when the parents of the dead needed help? No government department offered the couple assistance during the three days while the body of their son remained in the water.

The root cause of the problem is the absence of this public service. When a government does not help recover a body, there are those who will try and make money from people's desire to say goodbye and send off their loved ones with a funeral.

Worse, when the police finally arrived, they "negotiated" for a discount instead of providing the help the couple needed. They are well-trained and fully capable of retrieving the body from water but they simply did not do that. They bear some of the moral blame, as well.

After the incident happened, the local firefighters were quoted as saying that next time they would help for free. That's a good move by them, but it won't solve all the problems of this kind, because there is no law or regulation that clearly defines which government department should carry out such a service. Moreover, you cannot require every firefighter to do a job that's not required by law.

There are many other such occasions when people need such help, and if the law does not require governments to provide the service there will be more such incidents. It is time to legislate and make clear what kind of public services the government should provide, so that there won't be more people taking advantage of this in the future.