Suicide in China

Suicide in China has a long history as a cultural practice. Commemoration of Qu Yuan's patriotic suicide is popularly considered the basis for the annual Dragon Boat Festival. Study of modern suicide in China is complicated by political concerns which cause official statistics to vary (sometimes greatly) from the findings of independent studies. Generally speaking, China seems to have a lower suicide rate than neighboring Korea and Japan, with the practice more common among women than men and more common in the Yangtze Basin than elsewhere.

Ritual suicide was long practiced in traditional Chinese culture, owing both to the power of the state to enforce collective punishment against the families of disgraced ministers and to Confucian values that held that certain failures of virtue were worse than death, making suicide morally permissible or even praiseworthy in some altruistic contexts.Confucius wrote, "For gentlemen of purpose and men of ren while it is inconceivable that they should seek to stay alive at the expense of ren, it may happen that they have to accept death in order to have ren accomplished."Mencius wrote:

Fish is what I want; bear's palm is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take bear's palm than fish. Life is what I want; yi is also what I want. If I cannot have both, I would rather take yi than life. On the one hand, though life is what I want, there is something I want more than life. That is why I do not cling to life at all cost. On the other hand, though death is what I loathe, there is something I loathe more than death. That is why there are dangers I do not avoid ... Yet there are ways of remaining alive and ways of avoiding death to which a person will not resort. In other words, there are things a person wants more than life and there are also things he or she loathes more than death.

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