Researchers are scrambling to find out why. Last year a study by the World Bank, the World Health Organization and Harvard University put the rate at 30.3 per 100,000, compared with 10.7 for the rest of the world. Allowing for some of those officially listed as accidents, the study suggests that more than 300,000 Chinese kill themselves every year. It's a huge health problem. Particularly for women.
China is the only country in which more women than men kill themselves, and by a huge margin.
Across the land, women have fewer opportunities and lower status than men, and that is particularly true in the countryside. A significant number of suicides among rural women, studies have found, are impulsive acts, often in reaction to family conflicts over money or infidelity. They can't find solutions to their problems. Phillips has been working for a year and a half with Yang Gonghuan of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine in an effort to find out. Those deaths seem related to a breakdown in the country's health-care system and the rising cost of medical treatment.