(Bloomberg) -- Descendants of elite political families and senior Communist Party cadres in China have taken up an unusual cause: the end of life.

For Huang Jian, the turning point was the death of his father, a party veteran, last year. Although the 97-year-old had hoped to spend his last days at home, a local party body pressed the family to take him to the hospital, Huang says. There, doctors sought to keep him alive with oxygen masks and antibiotic drips. The son remembers him with life-support tubes, strapped to a hospital bed with bandages, crying out: “What did I do wrong to be tied here?”

Failure to take every measure to keep a person alive is seen as shameful and sometimes confused with euthanasia in China. So, senior officials are often given every treatment by the government to prolong their lives. That can leave these patients battling grueling therapies right to the end, rather than spending their final weeks and months more peacefully.

As science finds new ways to prolong life and entire populations age, countries from the U.S. to Japan are grappling with difficult conversations on death and the quality of a patient’s last days. In China, Huang found his solace by joining a group of princelings -- children of the nation’s highest ranking officials -- who shared similar memories and wished to promote the concept of dying with dignity.

“He must have left us while repeatedly tortured by fear, pain and helplessness,” Huang said of his father, Gong Taoyi, who was a deputy head of a department under the United Front Work Department of the party’s Central Committee. “I don’t know if he would blame us, hate us.”

Read full article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-11/do-not-resuscitate-china-s-elites-push-for-a-better-way-to-die-i61al0i2