Morbid suicide story of the day: A young woman in Taipei, Taiwan committed suicide by inhaling poisonous fumes while chatting with her friends on Facebook. None of her so-called friends called the police: more ›

Two 12-year-old girls in Zhangzhou, Fujian province have committed suicide, one of whom allegedly died for time-travel, local media reports. Xiaohua, one of the two girls, apparently was motivated to take her own life after being distraught over losing a remote control for the rolling door of her house, and planned her suicide on March 1st. more ›

Su Li (苏力), the party secretary of Wujiang district in the city of Shaoguan, was found dead after apparently hanging himself in his apartment this morning. Police have ruled out homicide as a possibility, though the investigation is still currently ongoing. Su was transferred to the position he held at the time of his death in September of last year. more ›

Sad news from Beijing. A 26-year-old man sliced off his genitals with a fruit knife at Tsinghua University Monday morning, and then deciding he didn't want to wait for the ambulance the campus clinic had called for, ran to a nearby hotel and jumped to his death: more ›

A high school student in Shangrao, Jiangxi province, recently jumped off the building to show a girl his love after he was rejected by her. more ›

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a primary school in Anze County, Shanxi Province, killing himself and wounding another 6. Local authorities say that at around 1530 on November 24, Feng Aihong (冯爱红), the suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a local primary school, killing himself on the spot. One teacher and five students who were having sports class were also wounded. However, they suffered only facial burns and there is no danger to their lives. more ›

One October afternoon after school, two primary school girls in Funan, Anhui province made a pact to kill themselves in their empty classroom. Before drinking the poison that they hoped would lead to their death, the students scrawled "blame our deaths on our math teacher" on their classroom's blackboard. After being treated in the hospital, the girls explained that they were upset that the teacher "deliberately found fault in the girl's work after the two did not attend their make-up lessons." The teacher denies these allegations. more ›

Remember the woman who saved a girl attempting suicide in Hangzhou's West Lake? Earlier media reports said she's American. Well, apparently she's a Uruguayan expatriate living here in Shanghai with her husband, and her name is Maria Fernandes. more ›

"When she jumped into the lake, the drowning woman was about 20 meters away from the pavilion and was sinking. I could only see her hair," Liu said. "But the foreign lady swam quickly to her, held up her chin with one hand and used the other to swim back." more ›

• A video of the Turkistan Islamic Party claiming responsibility for the recent attacks in Xinjiang has just been uploaded. When are all these cells just going to get together and start their own Jihadtube?
• 360buy.com is (allegedly) crossing its fingers for a $5 billion USD IPO next week, in what would be the largest internet-related IPO ever. Meanwhile, its CEO is a little coy about the whole affair, weibbing that he'll be in the middle of a desert.
• The Globe and Mail (who recently made the CCP lose major face) meditates on 9/11 and what it's meant for China.

The body of an anti-corruption official in Hubei was found with 11 stab wounds at 6:40pm on August 27th, and was promptly declared to be a case of suicide by local authorities. Xie Yexin (谢业新), an official with the Commission for Disciplinary Inspection in Jingzhou City's Gong'an County (荆州市公安县), was found dead in his office chair on Saturday, having suffered a total of 11 knife wounds to the neck, chest, abdomen and wrists. more ›

This little incident speaks volumes about Beijing locals and their misplaced sense of self-esteem. At 11:30am today, a man brandished a knife and threatened his own life near the intersection of Zhongguancun Street (中关村大街) and Haidian South Road (海淀南路) in Beijing's Haidian district (海淀区). Stopping traffic in the process of his solipsistic attention-seeking hostage situation, the man was eventually wrestled to the ground by SWAT team members after being distracted by journalists, with traffic then resuming to its regularly scheduled programming. more ›

It looks like the scourge of suicide at Foxconn continues unabated: a 21-year-old Foxconn employee fell from the sixth floor of a factory dormitory in the Longhua district (龙华) of Shenzhen on the 18th. Foxconn is of course the infamous manufacturing giant that produces iPhones, iPads, Xbox's, Playstation 3's, and not to mention products for other clients like Dell, HP and Nokia. It is the third suicide this year, following incidents in January and May, and the 18th since the beginning of 2010 (other sources [in Chinese] have the number lower, at 16). more ›

"EIGHT students told to quit a Beijing music school due to poor academic performances sought to commit suicide together, it was reported yesterday. One student from the Chinese Music Conservatory Middle School is being treated in the Beijing Chaoyang Hospital for attempted suicide; three have returned home; and four remain missing, the Beijing Times reported. The 10th-graders at the school's vocal department were told to leave before the end of August because they had failed more than one-third of their required courses. The 16-year-olds bought sleeping pills and decided to die together, according to the girl, who has not been named, receiving hospital treatment, the report said." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

The husband of Hong Kong actress Leanne Liu (刘雪华) plummeted to his death yesterday 4am from an apartment in the Wellington Garden complex at Huaihai Road West near Jiaotong University. The 64-year-old Taiwanese, Deng Yu-Quen (邓育昆) was an award winning scriptwriter in his own right and was said to be suffering from depression. His body was discovered among the bushes by his wife, and police have ruled out the possibility of homicide. [Shanghai Daily] more ›

The only good we can conceive of coming from this story is greater expediency for the construction of China's social welfare system: "A woman who attempted suicide after killing her 13-year-old twin sons with cerebral palsy in a south China city was sentenced to five years in prison for murder yesterday. Han Qunfeng, 37, was given a lenient sentence because she had "an extremely complicated family background and motive," Dongguan City No. 1 People's Court in Guangdong Province said, according to news portal Timedg.com. The former bank clerk made her sons drink water laced with sleeping pills before drowning them in the bathtub at her home in November 2010. She then dressed her sons in new pajamas and consumed a mixture of pesticide and rat poison to kill herself. But she threw up some of the poison in a semi-conscious state, was rushed to hospital by her husband the next morning and saved, the court heard. Han pleaded guilty and regretted killing her twin sons at the hearing on June 2. Han said she had lost all hope after looking after her disabled children for 13 years. Han's husband said the family was nearly bankrupt after spending all the money on the twins' treatment." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

Tragedy has struck again in light of this year's Gaokao, the Chinese national college entrance exam. On the morning of June 7 -- the first day of the exam -- a male student in Longhui County, Hunan province, committed suicide by jumping from the sixth floor of the dormitory building. He was immediately taken to the hospital, where he died soon after from sustaining critical injuries. more ›

"A parent asked me, what is education from a school's perspective? I told them that in general terms, it's to let students 'sleep well today, so they don't jump off a building tomorrow.'" more ›

And we thought we were melodramatic. On Tuesday afternoon in Changchun, 22-year-old Li Mou (李某) of Jilin province was rescued from a suicide attempt while dressed in a white wedding gown and cream-colored high heels. more ›

In a startling case from earlier this week, it seems that courts in Zhejiang Province have ruled that Tencent, the makers of the super popular QQ chat program, is 10% responsible for a student who killed himself. "Fan" responded to a "suicide invitation" by "Zhang" on QQ, and the two agreed to meet up and commit suicide. Only Fan died, when Zhang gave up because of the "unbearable pain." more ›

Following a string of at least eight suicides among government officials this year, the state is taking action - by packing potential hires off to the shrink before taking them in. Wu Hanfei, chief of the examination and assessment center of the Communist Party of China announced at a leadership pow-wow on Sunday that those applying for official posts in government will soon have to undergo a psychological analysis during selection to assess their "psychological qualities" as well as "moral integrity". more ›

Yesterday, around 11:20am, a woman committed suicide by jumping from the gym located on the 7th floor of Raffles City mall in People's Square. She broke through the roof of the Coldstone Creamery in the food mall and passed away. She was 20 years old. more ›

One of China's first pop singers to be fined for lip-synching, Fang Ziyuan, has allegedly tried to commit suicide, according to a Chengdu newspaper. Fang and her co-worker Ying Youcan, were accused of lip-synching their guest appearance at a Chinese pop diva's concert last year. more ›

The pressures of China’s national college entrance exam can have some tragic consequences: three gaokao takers have committed suicide in separate incidents in Hubei and Jiangsu provinces this week, repeating a disturbing pattern that happens nearly every year during China’s most rigorous academic test. more ›

Foxconn's recent rash of employee suicides has given rise to a slew of editorial cartoons lampooning the company and its methods of dealing with the aftermath. more ›

While the mayor of Putian, Fujian province's suicide yesterday was certainly shocking, it's been reported that these episodes of officials taking their own lives is part of a growing trend. more ›

Earlier today, Shanghai Daily reported that suicide remained the top killer for local college students in 2009. Thirteen students in Shanghai, including one international student, took their own lives last year. more ›

• The WSJ pours cold water over Warren Buffet's darling, BYD, pointing out that their oft-regaled batteries are produced using 15-year-old methods: cheap manual labor that scraps 15 to 30% of its produced batteries because they fail to meet quality standards. [WSJ]
• The controversy surrounding the suicide of a young woman at Shanghai Maritime University has underscored the alleged lack of sensitivity to the problems of out-of-town students in Shanghai's many colleges. [China Daily]
• A guard at one of those black jails in Beijing, the ones used to keep protesters from reaching Zhongnanhai, was sentenced to eight years in prison for raping a young female detainee. [Associated Press]

Suicidal thoughts, already plaguing Shanghai college students and unemployed graduates, are also on the minds of almost one in four secondary school students as well. According to a survey released yesterday, thoughts of killing themselves had occured to around 24.39% of students, with 15.23% taking it into serious consideration. One psychologist had this theory about the high rates: "Most young students nowadays come from families with rather good economic condition and haven't met much difficulties... Thus they are weak inside when facing frustrations." You know, as opposed to, say, a different set of pressures born from being an only child in a system that determines your self worth based on test scores? Jeez, we hope Shan Huaihai never becomes our shrink. Source: Shanghai Daily more ›

The 25-year-old Foxconn employee who killed himself after being interrogated about a missing iPhone prototype had demonstrated a pattern of suspiciously losing products, according to the New York Times. James Lee, GM of Foxconn's China operations, said that several times products had gone missing and then he got them back. Oh. Well then. We guess the solitary confinement and searching his home and alleged beating was justified. NOT. Dear Foxconn, if your employee is acting out of line, you give them a warning and then fire them. Nothing justifies acting like thugs towards them, and any attempts to sully his name after the fact stinks as much as the $44,000 and Apple laptop you paid to his family in blood money. Source: Apple Insider more ›