It claims more young lives than tuberculosis or road accidents. But it has been happening so quietly that almost no one has noticed. In China, and other parts of Asia, people are killing themselves in disturbingly large numbers. Since 1990, some 2 million Chinese people are believed to have committed suicide—equivalent to the populations of Washington DC and Manhattan combined. No one knows for sure what underlies China's staggering suicide rate, or even whether it has always been this bad. But one thing is clear: the pattern of suicide in this massive country is unlike anything seen in the West. Nor can the Chinese pattern of suicide be dismissed as an inconvenient exception to the norm. In 1990, the latest year for which reliable global data are available, China, with 22 per cent of the world's people, accounted for more than 40 per cent of all suicides worldwide. The differences are stark. Male suicides in the industrialised West outnumber female suicides by three or four to one; in China, female suicides outnumber male suicides, the only country in the world where this is the case. Among Chinese women aged 15 to 44 years old, as many as one in four deaths are suicides, compared with about one in ten in this age group in the rich West.
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