For centuries, Qing Ming was a day to not only clean the tombs of one's ancestors, but to worship them as well. Ancestor worship goes far back into Chinese history. The Chinese long believed that their ancestors had a need for certain goods in the next life (like money or food), and that by offering these to them, their descendants would be blessed with good fortune. To the best of my understanding, many rural Chinese still mark the holiday by visiting the tombs of their family members and praying to them. The tradition of visiting the graves of one's family members also persists among urbanites. For example, here in Beijing, where I live, large crowds flock toBabaoshan ("Eight Treasure Mountain") Cemetery, where many "revolutionary heroes" and other prominent Chinese are buried, during Qing Ming.
The greatest impact of this holiday for me is that I get three days off (Monday through Wednesday) from my teaching responsibilities. Since Qing Ming is officially only a one-day holiday, how, you may ask, can it be a three-day holiday? The answer is that the university where I teach and many other institutions, as well as many companies, extend official holidays by requiring their employees to work on a weekend, usually the one preceding the actual holiday. Thus, an additional two days become available for time off. Of course, the downside of this practice is that sometimes it becomes necessary to work for seven days straight! A similar policy is followed by public schools, so schoolchildren are expected to attend school on Saturday and Sunday in order to have a longer holiday thereafter. However, I doubt we will be sending our daughter to school on Sunday (or perhaps even Saturday)! This just seems too much.
It is tempting to compare Qing Ming with Easter, especially as Easter this year will occur just a few days after Qing Ming. On the one hand, I suppose one could say that both holidays reflect the persistence of the belief (or hope) that death is not the end, that there is life beyond the grave. On the other hand, I would say, as a Christian, that the belief in an afterlife reflected in Qing Ming is based on mere shadowy religious traditions, and that the nature of that afterlife is decidedly not that much different from our life in this world--the dead still have needs, needs that must be met by the living. In contrast, the belief in the afterlife reflected in Easter is based on a historical event, the Resurrection, and that afterlife is conceived as being quite different from this life--to a degree that we cannot really imagine--one in which all our needs shall be met perfectly, forever. What a wonderful difference!