A man in China has accused the adoptive parents of his 16-year-old daughter of selling her as a “ghost bride” after she committed suicide.
However, while the police have been able to track down the 66,000 yuan (US$9,300) bride price transfer, they say there are no grounds for a prosecution.
The man, surnamed Sun, from eastern China’s Shandong province, said his biological daughter, Xiaodan, committed suicide by jumping from her ninth-floor home last December after long-term emotional abuse by her adoptive parents.
Sun said he and his wife put Xiaodan up for adoption in 2006 because they already had twins and could not afford to raise her. They visited her sometimes, pretending to be relatives of the adoptive family.
Sun accused the adoptive parents of “marrying” her to a young dead man, surnamed Zhang, after she died, and receiving a 66,000-yuan (US$9,300) bride price from his parents.
Ghost marriages have a 3,000-year history in China and are still practised in certain less-developed rural areas.
An ancient tradition holds that a person who dies single will not be blessed in the afterlife and should be matched with others who have died unmarried.
As with traditional Chinese weddings, families of a newlywed “ghost couple” exchange both bride price and dowry and regard each other as relatives by marriage.
One online observer has described ghost marriages as “an insult to the dead and modern civilisation in the name of love”.
The practice has led to crimes such as the theft of corpses or bone ashes of young women, which are then sold to become the “bride” of a dead man.
Sun said Xiaodan was buried with Zhang to complete the wedding ceremony.
He asked the police to punish the adoptive parents for domestic violence and desecrating corpses.
However, according to the Shanghai Morning Post, the police could not find any evidence of a crime, despite tracking down the 66,000-yuan money transfer from the dead man’s parents to Xiaodan’s adoptive parents.
Investigators said there were no legal grounds for punishing people involved in ghost marriages.
Yao Jianlong, director of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Law, told China Women’s News that arranging a ghost marriage is not a crime under Chinese law, and previous cases led to punishment only because those involved had broken other laws, such as stealing and damaging the corpses.