Some burial mounds removed in a funeral reform campaign last year in central China recently reappeared, highlighting a conflict between preserving farmland and upholding cultural traditions.

Some burial mounds removed in a funeral reform campaign last year in central China recently reappeared in Zhoukou City, Henan Province.

Some 100,000 burial mounds were secretly rebuilt during the Spring Festival holiday in Zhoukou City, Henan Province, after they were dug up and relocated to public cemeteries in a massive tomb-clearing campaign last year, according to the Civil Affairs Bureau of Zhoukou.

The rebuilt burial mounds account for about 7.7 percent of those that were removed, sources with the bureau said, refuting online rumors that 1 million such mounds were rebuilt.

The Zhoukou municipal government launched the campaign last February to encourage local villagers to relocate the remains of their deceased family members to public cemeteries so farmland could be reclaimed in the agriculture-dominated region.

The move, however, met with great resistance from local residents and aroused public concern that it contradicted Chinese traditional funeral culture.

Even so, more than 2 million of Zhoukou's 3.5 million burial mounds were relocated, allowing for 30,000 mu (2,000 hectares) of farmland to be reclaimed before the operation was called off in November, statistics from the city government show.