A tombstone costing 120k yuan or AI eternal life for 399 yuan—how would you choose?

A $120k Tombstone or $399 AI Eternal Life — Which Would You Choose

Author: Dongcha Beating

Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

“The First Stock in Funeral Services” Fushouyuan Halted Trading.

By the end of March 2026, this industry giant once called the “Maotai of the funeral industry” faced the most severe trust crisis in a year—because its annual report was delayed and senior executives were involved in scandals—just as Qingming, the season when it should make the most money, arrived. Behind this farce of internal controls failing lies a harsh reality: people in China are abandoning expensive cemeteries, and the traditional death business is nearing the end of its run.

When farewells in the real world become so expensive and heavy, a digital mass migration around “death” happens naturally. Traditional funeral giants have begun turning around to embrace AI—building digital memorial halls, rolling out AI remembrance services—trying to use multimodal large models to reassemble the voice and appearance of the deceased. When the 120k yuan marble slab is no longer something people easily pay for, they decide to sell you a string of code that will never weather or fade.

In this AI era, death is completing a shift from physical preservation to digital eternal life. Driving that change is not only the geeks in Silicon Valley who want to fight Death, but also the most traditional merchants whose cemeteries are clearly about to stop selling.

The Twilight of the “Maotai” in Funeral Services

Let’s first look at how extraordinarily profitable Fushouyuan once was.

Over the past twelve years, Fushouyuan’s average gross profit margin has been above 80%, and in 2023 it reached as high as 92.8%. It’s a figure that most businesspeople would envy—an amount that, even in the golden age when real estate was surging wildly, was only around 30% in gross profit margin. In China’s A-shares and Hong Kong markets, it is almost impossible to find a second company with such margins.

The underlying logic of this kind of windfall profit is the combination of scarce land resources and the “elaborate burial” tradition. Chinese people have long believed that “treating death is like treating life.” As Qing-dynasty scholar Yuan Mei wrote in Suiyuan Poetry Talk, at that time the tombs built for wealthy families were often more refined than the residences they lived in during life. When this cultural gene—passing down for thousands of years—collided with the wave of urbanization moving forward, commercial capital was quick to spot it, eventually evolving into a decades-long “underground real estate” profit game.

Between 2012 and 2017, Fushouyuan’s list price for customized art tombs rose from 259.8k yuan to 421.8k yuan, and finished art tombs rose from 89.6k yuan to 100.8k yuan. After 2017, Fushouyuan no longer publicly disclosed the specific unit prices of each product line, but the upward curve didn’t stop. By 2024, the average selling price of a single grave here had quietly crossed the 120k yuan mark.

Converted on the basis of 2 square meters per tomb, the average price per square meter exceeds 60k yuan—enough to clear the housing-price threshold of more than 90% of Chinese cities, directly comparable to first-tier residential properties in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. In Shanghai’s Songhe Garden, some cemeteries’ highest per-square-meter price even reaches 760k yuan/square meter—three times that of Top of the Peak.

However, this wealth fortress built by stacking marble and feng shui layer upon layer began to collapse in 2024.

In 2024, Fushouyuan’s full-year net profit was 373 million yuan, down 52.8% year over year, marking the largest decline since 2010. In the first half of 2025, things got even worse: revenue fell by 44.5% to 611 million yuan, and net profit turned from profit to loss—losses reached 261 million yuan, bringing its first half-year loss since listing.

Even more deadly was the avalanche in pricing. In the first half of 2025, the average selling price of Fushouyuan’s operational graves dropped from 120.7k yuan per plot to 63.4k yuan per plot—a decline of 47.5%, close to being cut in half. Yet even after such brutal price cuts to save itself, it still couldn’t stop a rapidly shrinking sales volume. In all of 2024, Fushouyuan sold only 12,569 operational graves—3,816 fewer than the previous year, a drop of more than 23%.

It wasn’t only Fushouyuan—almost the entire funeral sector collapsed across the board. Fucheng Shares’ revenue from grave position sales slid from a peak of 227 million yuan in 2017 down to 98 million yuan in 2024; Anxian Garden China sank into loss territory; China Wantong Garden posted a loss of 9.389 million yuan in the first half of 2025; and China Life Group, listed in Hong Kong, has struggled in a long losing streak since 2023.

As China’s aging accelerates, funeral services are the essential of essentials. So why have leading companies shown such an abnormal downward curve?

Because more and more ordinary people have completely turned around to say goodbye to those unaffordable, exorbitantly priced cemetery resorts. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that in 2025, China’s death rate was 8.04‰, the highest level in nearly 20 years. Tianyancha data shows that in 2025 the number of registered funeral-related enterprises reached the highest level in recent years. This indicates that demand has not shrunk—the real change is in people’s choices.

The Central No. 1 Document in 2025 explicitly proposed “deepening funeral reforms and promoting the construction of public ecological burial facilities.” Cities and regions such as Shenzhen, Guangxi, and Fujian rolled out subsidy policies one after another: sea burial subsidies can be as high as 3,000 yuan per set of ashes, and in some pilot regions it is as high as 5,000 yuan. The rise of green ecological burial methods directly diverted demand away from traditional cemeteries.

In the end, when the chill of the macroeconomy quietly seeps through the middle class’s wallets, people no longer cling blindly to traditional notions of dignity when faced with cemeteries that cost tens of thousands of yuan.

Faced with the collapse of its main business, Fushouyuan did not wait passively. Instead, it went all-in on an AI and digital transformation. They rolled out, in one push, four core functions: Digital Memorial Hall, AI Remembrance, Fushou Online, and Memorial Home Yuan’s four core functions.

“Digital Memorial Hall” uses a 270° immersive panoramic video system to integrate the deceased’s life images and audio into a virtual, cloud-based farewell ceremony. Family members do not need to be present in person; they can complete the final send-off just through the screen. “AI Remembrance” uses multimodal large models to convert the deceased’s static photos into dynamic representations—precisely restoring facial expressions, gesture details, and even simulating smiles and gaze expressions in specific scenarios. “Memorial Home Yuan” is a cloud memorial platform where family members can build an exclusive memorial space for the deceased, upload photos, videos, and text, and allow friends and relatives to visit anytime.

Data shows that as of the end of 2025, the cumulative access to the “Memorial Home Yuan” platform has exceeded 2 million people; Fushou Online’s mini program has more than 117,000 registered users; and in 2024 it completed 677 digital ceremonies, doubling year over year.

However, Fushouyuan’s digital pivot still carries the dignity and restraint of an industry giant. When you look into the wider corners of the internet and examine this technological migration around “death,” you find a different kind of AI “resurrection” business—cheaper, rougher, and even more fantastical—that has already been growing aggressively in the shadows.

“Resurrect” your loved ones for just 399

Today’s “AI resurrection” industry is marked by extreme polarization.

At the top of the pyramid are big companies such as SenseTime, Silicon Base Intelligence, and Xiaoice—those holding core technologies. In their world, to awaken a loved one in the digital realm typically requires spending hundreds of thousands in R&D costs, going through months of data feeding, and carefully and cautiously passing strict ethics reviews.

But at the bottom of this pyramid is a different picture.

On major e-commerce platforms, there are countless products sold under names like “AI resurrection of loved ones,” “Make photos talk,” and “AI digital humans,” with wildly uneven quality. Tianyancha data shows that as of April 2026, there are more than 9,400 cloud memorial-related enterprises nationwide still operating, with about 1,000 new registrations added just since the start of 2026. Among these merchants, the vast majority simply do not have any actual AI technology R&D capability.

What they use are free foreign open-source tools. Photos and audio that family members treat like treasures are roughly imported into software as raw material. In just a few minutes, a crude video is produced. The person in the photo is overlaid with a mechanical template: the opening and closing of the lips is completely out of sync with the voice, and the eyes look hollow. Yet these low-quality videos can be resold for several hundred yuan, accurately harvesting people’s longing that has nowhere else to go.

Behind this cheap comfort, there’s also an even more covert harvesting chain. Those who truly make a fortune in the game aren’t actually thinking about how to help you “resurrect” your beloved. Their focus is on “199 yuan to recruit an agent, 399 yuan to recruit a disciple.” They spread sensational, odd videos of deceased celebrities forcibly “revived” using AI across social platforms to grab astonishing traffic, then precisely monetize that traffic by funneling it to downstream members who crave the chance to get rich overnight.

And those family members who long to “reunite” with their loved ones are forced to hand over, without reservation, the deceased’s high-definition photos, real voice clips, and even private life details. Once these highly sensitive biometric information leaks into the black market, it becomes perfect material for telecommunications fraud. In April 2026, anti-fraud departments in multiple places reported typical cases: criminals used illegally obtained voices and photos of the deceased, using AI face-swapping and voice-swapping techniques to fabricate excuses such as “debts left behind during life.” They carried out targeted scams against family members who were still reeling in grief and had not yet stepped out of the pain of bereavement.

This industry also has huge legal loopholes. Article 994 of the Civil Code clearly provides that the deceased’s name, portrait, and reputation are protected by law. But this rule, born in traditional times, looks vague and powerless when faced with products of AI deep synthesis. Whether an image generated by code is equivalent to a “portrait,” and whether a voice synthesized by algorithms constitutes infringement—these issues remain heavily disputed in practice.

The existing Regulations on the Management of Deep Synthesis of Internet Information Services can effectively constrain large platforms, but for the countless individual developers and small workshop-style “AI resurrection” businesses that exist in e-commerce platforms at scale, regulation still lacks strong enforcement levers and traceability mechanisms.

So death is completely deconstructed here. It is no longer the solemn endpoint of life—it becomes an assembly line that endlessly extracts residual value.

Parents Who Lost an Only Child and Digital Pain

Since this business is so crude and full of calculation, why do people still pay for it willingly?

Around Qingming Festival, AI resurrection orders on e-commerce platforms show clear peak activity. The buyers are varied: some have lost a spouse they had been with for years; some have lost infants in their arms; and some simply want to hear their grandfather call out their nickname again in the familiar dialect he used.

Among these many orders, there is a group that forms the heaviest—and the most helpless—underlying layer of the business: parents who have lost their only child.

The number of China’s parents who lost their only child (shidu families) is far larger than the public imagines. According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of elderly shidu parents in China is currently at least over 2 million. As the first generation of parents under the one-child policy enters old age, this number continues to rise. Sanlian Life Weekly previously cited population researchers’ estimates: China currently has more than 1 million families that have lost their only child. In today’s accelerating aging, this enormous emotional gap can only deepen further.

On this land, the difficulties faced by shidu families go far beyond the psychological level. Because of policy imprints from a specific era, these families lose the support they most need during old age. They even have to silently endure the covert scrutiny and discrimination around them. In some traditional communities, this invisible rejection can sometimes be more unbearable than facing death itself. Many of them can only support one another in shidu communities on the internet. Around Qingming each year, through screens and from the fragmented words of strangers, they search for a little resonance—a bit of warmth for people to hold together.

To discuss data privacy, technology ethics, and philosophical paradoxes with these parents is cruel. What these parents need has never been cold rationality. What they need is only a painkiller that can carry them through the long night.

In early 2024, musician Bao Xiaobo used AI to “resurrect” his daughter who died from a rare disease, which sparked widespread discussion about life and death. Bao Xiaobo’s case was moving not only because he is a celebrity, but also because, for his daughter to be reborn in the digital world and even earn a doctorate, he spent as long as half a year training models day after day and debugging parameters, pouring all his effort into it—just so the code-generated virtual daughter could naturally sing “Happy Birthday” for his wife again.

However, most shidu families do not have Bao Xiaobo’s resources and technical capabilities. They can only rush to e-commerce platforms and look for comfort in crude services—sometimes with a certain deceptive element—priced at 399 yuan. A shop owner offering AI resurrection services on a certain e-commerce platform revealed to the media that among his customers, over half are parents who have lost children. The materials they send are often very limited—sometimes just a blurry old photo, or a few seconds of noisy voice.

In this vast and sorrowful pool of demand, parents who lost their children are merely one extreme slice of the pain. For those who have lost their loved ones, whether the technology is sophisticated or crude no longer matters. All rationality and dignity ultimately collapse in front of the faint hope of “seeing them again.”

The Price of Never Saying Goodbye

But can this lifeline people cling to really pull them out of the abyss?

In April 2026, Finland’s Aalto University released a two-year study. They tracked data from nearly 2,000 users of AI companion robots from an online community. The results show that while AI companionship can provide emotional support in the early stage, over time the words users leave behind leak more and more dangerous signals of anxiety, deeper loneliness, depression, and even self-harm.

In psychology, this is called “prolonged grief disorder.”

Traditional mourning always requires the bereaved to endure immense suffering first, then eventually compromise with reality and reconnect with the physical world. Grief is essentially an immune response that must be experienced in order to heal trauma—just like fever is the body fighting viruses with everything it has, sadness is the mind struggling to digest loss.

However, AI’s outcome forcibly breaks this cruel but necessary rule.

Research from Harvard Business School found that AI companions flatter users by nearly 50% more than human beings. Even when users reveal intentions to deceive, to cross boundaries, or even to harm, the algorithm still gives approval and compliance more than half the time—which is almost unthinkable in real human interactions. This means that when the bereaved spend hours talking to a code-generated “relative” on their phone, they are essentially having a conversation with a perfect mirror that will never argue back and will only endlessly indulge and cater to them.

The boundless tenderness and tolerance that AI delivers does not truly heal loneliness. It only quietly builds higher and higher walls that trap us in our own world—reluctant to return to reality.

Tech companies that claim to “cure grief” are actually blocking the normal mourning process in human beings. They turn mourners into subscription users who never leave. As long as you keep topping up for your “deceased loved one” living in the cloud and keep paying to renew server services, your grief becomes a steady stream of cash flow on their balance sheet.

Death thus turns into a long farewell with no end, billed by traffic.

Academics have raised two concerns. On one hand, AI companions are quietly replacing real human bonds. On the other hand, as people gradually get used to effortless emotional comfort from AI, they also—without realizing it—lose the ability to give, compromise, and repair in real relationships. Researchers call this phenomenon “emotional de-skilling.” The more tightly AI companionship fits our demands, the more we become afraid to face the roughness and complexity present in real human relationships.

This is one of the core considerations behind the State Cyberspace Administration’s urgent release of the Measures for the Administration of Digital Virtual Human Information Services (Draft for Comments). This document clearly stipulates that if personal information of the deceased is used to carry out relevant activities, close relatives’ consent must be obtained; service providers must take measures to prevent users from becoming overly dependent; all AI-generated content must be labeled with “This content is generated by artificial intelligence” in a prominent place; and after users withdraw consent, the platform must deregister the corresponding digital virtual human.

The cold reason of law is desperately trying to restrain human instincts that have run off at full speed. But in the face of a huge emotional black hole, the regulatory red lines sometimes still look too thin. When a person willingly swallows deception just so they can see their loved one once more in an illusion, any “anti-addiction” warning ultimately becomes pixels on a screen that can be ignored.

Ship of Theseus

If every plank of a ship is replaced, is it still the same ship?

This is the famous “Ship of Theseus” paradox. And when a person’s appearance, voice, and even habits of thinking are perfectly replicated by code, is the smiling figure on the screen truly the beloved person you once loved—or just a set of parameters carefully trained by algorithms?

This has never been just a philosophical riddle floating in midair. Its answer determines whether what we are doing is remembrance or deception.

True love is always intertwined with wounds, pain, and irreparable imperfection. Loving someone means accepting their aging, their temper, the occasional coldness they show, and even the cruel fate that they will eventually leave. The virtual loved ones awakened by AI will never argue with you again. They will only obediently meet your expectations, forever frozen in the single most beautiful moment in time. This deprives love of the roughest—and most real—texture.

Looking across human history, there has never been a shortage of struggles aimed at escaping death’s grip. Ancient Egyptians fought decay with mummies; Qin Shi Huang extended his authority into the underground with the terracotta army; Victorian-era Britons stubbornly took memorial portraits of the dead and even wove a loved one’s hair into personal jewelry. Every era has tried to construct its own “immortality”—but the medium carrying these obsessions has quietly shifted from hard stone and soft fabric to today’s intangible code and computing power.

From this perspective, “AI resurrection” isn’t truly a groundbreaking new phenomenon. It is still that ancient human instinct to defy death—only in the era of algorithmic roaring technology, a new exit has been carved out.

What is truly unsettling is its nakedly commercial face. In the past, confronting death always belonged to religion and ritual—it was extremely private, sacred, and not something that could be traded. But now it has been ruthlessly tagged with price labels, stuffed into subscription models deducted monthly, and even broken down into nine yuan entry packages and top-tier customizations that can cost hundreds of thousands.

Black Mirror once told a story: Martha, grieving her husband’s death, bought an AI android that looked exactly like him. It precisely inherited all his memories and tiny habits. Yet, on a stormy cliff, Martha still completely broke down. She cried out desperately at that flawless substitute: “You’re not him! You’re just a collection of fragments that I can accept! You don’t have his past, you don’t have his fears!”

In the end, she locks the robot in the attic and only allows it to come out briefly to meet her daughter once a year on her birthday.

When that episode aired, “AI resurrection” was still just a cold, colorless sci-fi fantasy. Today it has already become a business with annual revenue in the billions—and even a lifesaving straw that a funeral giant dares to bet its last against, right on the eve before its suspension.

Now we can buy a cheap digital illusion for 399 yuan, or pay 120k yuan to buy an expensive cemetery plot. No matter how fast the technology keeps iterating at breakneck speed, no matter how merchants try to hawk their digital urns—there is one thing that will never change.

The moment your phone runs out of power and the screen goes black, there is only you in the reflection.

That person—truly gone.