Nector Gan
South China Morning Post
May 3, 2015
Chen Tianhong died on Thursday.
Reports of a third Chinese official committing suicide last month – following news that four other officials killed themselves in March – have caused a stir among users of mainland social media.
On Thursday morning Chen Tianhong, the head of a town in Jiangsu province, jumped to his death from the 21st floor of the government building.
Family members said Chen, 34, was emotionally unstable at the time of his death after suffering from serious insomnia, the Xinhua news agency reported.
His death was the third suicide of an official to be reported by Chinese media last month, after the division head of the public security bureau of Mudanjiang city , in northeastern Heilongjiang province, hanged himself on Friday last week and the Communist party chief of Yizhou city , in southern Guangxi province, leapt to his death last Tuesday.
In March, four officials jumped to their deaths on three consecutive days.
Some internet users questioned what had gone wrong with mainland officials, with many suggesting the deaths could be linked to the crackdown on corruption launched by President Xi Jinping after he came to power in November 2012.
The number of suicides recorded by officials has risen sharply in recent years, which analysts said was inevitably linked to Xi’s anti-graft campaign. More than 100 “tigers” – corrupt senior officials – and many low-level cadres “flies” have been purged.
Between 2003 and 2012, the suicides of 112 officials were reported by mainland media, said an academic paper written about the phenomenon by Qi Xingfa, a politics professor at Shanghai’s East China Normal University.
The number of “irregular deaths” among cadres reached 54 between January 2013 and April 2014, of which 23 were confirmed as suicides by authorities, the China Youth Daily reported.
Last year the website of the People’s Tribune, a magazine published by the Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily, reported that 36 officials had committed suicide. The Knowlesys online public opinion monitoring service put the number at 72 after counting cases that had appeared in media reports.
Little information about the reason for the suicides has been made public. But in those cases that authorities offered a brief explanation, “depression” was the most common cause of people taking their own lives.
Zhu Lijia, a public policy professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance, said the increase in the number of cases of suicide was “directly related” to the crackdown on corruption.
“As the anti-graft campaign widens, and public participation in reporting corrupt officials increases, such officials are under huge mental stress,” Zhu told the South China Morning Post.
“Although not all officials who committed suicides were related to corruption, the pressure from the anti-graft campaign did partially cause mental stress and depression among officials.”
The rise in suicides among cadres since the crackdown had led the party to launch a national survey to find out how many members had killed themselves, the Financial Times reported.
Chinese law has also contributed to the rise in suicides among cadres, Qi said in his paper. Under the Criminal Procedure Law of China, suspects and defendants will no longer be held criminally liable after they die. Those already prosecuted will have their case withdrawn or be declared innocent. “This provision has led to officials using suicide as an effective way to protect families and others,” Qi said.
