A striptease may not be exactly what you expect from a funeral, but at least in rural China, erotic dancers are frequently hired to ensure high turnouts for these otherwise somber events -- a practice which the government in Beijing is now cracking down on, the South China Morning Post reported.

The communist country's Ministry of Culture warned that firm action would be taken to stop such performances, which it said had become increasingly common in the countryside.

"This kind of illegal operation has disrupted the order of the rural, cultural market and (has) corrupted social morality," the ministry charged in a statement.

In a notice on its website, it called for a "black list" of individuals and businesses that sponsor the shows, NBC News detailed. The ministry rebuked a group of burlesque dancers, the Red Rose Song and Dance Troupe, saying its members had performed a striptease after the small-town funeral of an elderly person in the northern province of Hebei in February.

"Two strippers wearing revealing clothes danced on a stage in the public square in our village," a resident told the Global Times, the Chinese government's English-language mouthpiece, according to the South China Morning Post.

"They first danced passionately and then took off their clothes piece by piece. Behind them, an electronic screen was displaying a picture of the deceased with elegiac couplets on either side."

The source told the Global Times that the Red Rose Song and Dance Troupe had received about $480 for the performance; the group's leader was later fined about $11,300 and detained for 15 days, the newspaper added.

Members of a troupe in east China's Jiangsu province, meanwhile, were held after performing funeral shows that drew crowds of as many as 500 local residents, Agence France-Presse said based on reports by the provincial news site xichu.net.

Its members engaged in "erotic performances on the stage with sexual organs exposed and imitating sexual acts," police officer Tang Jinyang told the Chinese website.