In fact, just three nights later, Ms. Wang was at it again, this time working to save an elementary school friend. But in this case, by the time the tractor pulled up to the four-story white concrete hospital, the woman's heart had stopped.
Most victims are young rural women.
Chinese officials have said that the Western estimates, derived from crude suicide statistics that China first released in the early 1990s, are probably too high. But in the last few years, a small group of government officials, researchers, health workers and women's advocates in China have gingerly started to research and confront what is still so often regarded as a sensitive and embarrassing problem. But there are still few answers for an outbreak defying the traditional wisdom that suicide is largely a problem of urban men. In China there are three times as many suicides in the countryside as in the cities. Faced with such statistics, a few smaller magazines and newspapers directed toward women have decided to broach the subject in the last two years, and a book on women's suicide is scheduled to come out soon.