Hong Kong’s Singtao Daily reported on the 5th that the distribution of robots and drones is changing the culture of Chinese Qingming Festival’s graves. Qingming Festival is one of China’s four traditional holidays, and families visit ancestral graves to celebrate spring.
On Chinese social media, southern Chinese residents, including Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan, made headlines on the 4th when they were transporting ritual food by robot dogs and drones to mark the Qing holiday. These areas had to climb cliffs or take a long hike to visit the graves because the terrain was rugged, but they used high-tech devices to solve the difficulties of the graves.
In the video uploaded on Weibo, a robot dog puts down an object in a position where visitors to the grave are waiting across a steep mountain with a large box of pig’s head on its back. In another video, a young man in Guangxi Province used a drone to hold a rite at his ancestral grave on a 300-meter mountain. “The drone flew fruits, pork, and alcohol to the top of the mountain in a few minutes. It was comfortable to move the ritual supplies first with the drone and climb the mountain with bare hands,” he said. The drone he rented is worth 60,000 yuan, which is usually used for fertilizer and pesticide spraying. The rental cost of the drone is about 100 yuan per session.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) report released last year, China has installed 276,000 new industrial robots in 2023, the largest number in the world, and the cumulative number of robots in operation is more than 1.75 million. DJI, a Chinese drone company, has controlled about 80 percent of the global commercial drone market.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
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