One day in late August 2011 in Shanghai’s outer suburbs, a 21-year-old college student opened the window of her fifth floor apartment block and threatened to jump. As is typically the case when drama unfolds, a crowd soon gathered and the emergency services were called. Sadly, suicide threats are not a rare sight in China, and the victim is very likely to be a young girl, like this one. While the troubled woman deliberated on the windowsill, the yells of the crowd below took on a sinister tone. “Just jump!” yelled one onlooker. Eventually, spurred on by the unsympathetic jibes, the girl flung herself from the window. The emergency services had erected an air bag under the window so she came to no harm, but the reaction of the crowd is chilling.

A similar situation unfolded in 2009 in what is possibly the most famous suicide case of recent years. A Guangzhou man named Chen Fuchao climbed onto Haizhu Bridge to end his own life when a failed construction project left him with crippling debt. Traffic was held up for five hours until a disgruntled commuter, 66-year-old Lai Jiansheng, took matters into his own hands. Telling the police that he wanted to persuade Chen to come down, Lai approached Chen, but instead of offering him words of comfort, he pushed him off the bridge. Fortunately there was an airbag to break his fall, but Lai’s callous actions reverberated in cyberspace, leading many to question and criticise his lack of empathy.

The hard facts

Death by one’s own hand is now the fifth likeliest cause of death in China, with 287,000 suicides per year. According to official statistics released recently, suicide accounts for 3.6% of all deaths in China, and 75% of these suicides occur in rural areas. Between the ages of 15 and 34, suicide is the number one cause of death. Chinese women are 25% more likely than men to kill themselves, which falls contrary to the rest of the world. It is most probably the pressures placed on women by society that lead to this skewed figure, since the role of the female has always been subordinate to males. Even before they are born, women are seen as less desirable, with many baby girls being abandoned at birth or killed. Many of those that survive into adulthood feel commoditized as mere marriage pawns. Suicide is a way out of an unhappy family situation, and an escape from ill-meaning parents-in-law and violent husbands. In rural areas, the ready availability of pesticides makes female suicide more common, according to Xu Rong, head of the Suicide Prevention Project at the Beijing Cultural Development Centre for Rural Women.

China’s suicide problem was brought to world attention in 2010 with the now-infamous spate of suicides at Foxconn factories in Guangdong Province. Between January and November 2010, eighteen employees attempted to take their own lives, and fourteen succeeded. The world’s media leapt to attention, not least because Foxconn held manufacturing contracts with global brands like Apple, Nokia, Samsung and Dell. Harrowing comparisons were wrought between the wealthy, brand-hungry fat cats in the West and the poor migrant workers toiling to meet their demands in the East. The Foxconn deaths garnered attention due to their numbers and copycat suicides seem to be on the rise.

As recently as September 19th 2011, three schoolchildren leapt from the roof of their school in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, after their teacher reprimanded them for not completing their homework. All three survived, but the incident raised questions about the pressures placed on young people. In Shanghai at the start of the 2011 school year, a teenage girl jumped to her death from her apartment in Pudong rather than face the burden of the new term.

Suicide is prevalent not only among young people, and not only among the laobaixing(common people). Over the past couple of years, several high-ranking officials have killed themselves, typically due to shame over corruption. Aside from the farcical murder/suicide case of Xie Yexin, an official at a county Disciplinary Committee in Hubei, at least eight cadres have killed themselves in the past year.

Suicide in China – virtuous or stigmatic?

The differences in attitudes to suicide in China and the Western world can be attributed to religion’s role (or the lack of). In Christian countries, suicide is seen as shameful because it goes against the will of their God. The bodies of suicide victims are not permitted to be buried on consecrated ground and the topic is taboo. In China, however, Confucian values mean that suicide is thought of not as shameless, but as noble. Confucius taught that “For men of purpose and virtue, while it is inconceivable that they should seek to stay alive at the expense of virtue, it may happen that they have to accept death in order to have virtue accomplished.” His disciple Mencius concurred: “Life is what I want. Righteousness is what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take righteousness than life.”

Confucius is also responsible for the school of thought that places one’s own immediate family at the centre of one’s universe, removing the need for empathy towards the plight of other people. It is this thinking that allows men like Lai Jiansheng to push another man off a bridge and which justifies onlookers taunting young girls to jump out the window. With China’s suicide rate rising year on year, it may be time to take a closer look at the causes.

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