Beijing, Chinese people are being urged to opt for cremation instead of burial to save the dwindling land resources available in the world's most populous nation.

China's funeral reforms had achieved a lot over the past several decades, but are now running into resistance as new graves proliferate in some areas, vice-minister of Civil Affairs, Dou Yupei said.

"Bodies are sometimes cremated and then the ashes are put into coffins for burial, wasting land," he told a meeting of the China Funeral Association in the eastern metropolis, Shanghai.

"This shows the funeral reform is not complete," he said.

Some large Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai handle one lakh bodies each year. Nationwide, nearly nine million bodies need to be processed, he said.

"Where could we get the land to bury all those people? We must fully implement a cremation policy," he said.

China has a longstanding custom of burying the dead. But iconoclastic 'Chairman' Mao Zedong took a different view. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Mao's initiative to encourage cremation.

Chinese leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping have set fine examples for modern funerals, requesting that their ashes be scattered in the mountains or on the high sea.

In 1977, the government started to encourage cremation rather than burial, and simple funerals instead of extravagant and superstitious ceremonies.

About 67.27 million human remains were cremated from 1978 to 2005 in China, saving tens of thousands of hectares of land and trees and billions of yuan, statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.