Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 1

SUICIDE AS RESISTANCE IN MODERN CHINA

Submitted to:

Mr. Mark Laurence Cevallos

Submitted by:

Mia May V. Barrera

B.S. Computer Science 1

April 8, 2013
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 2

Abstract

According to recently available statistics, China has by far the world’s largest number of
reported suicides: more than 300,000 each year, comprising 42 percent of all suicides world-
wide and 56 percent of all suicides in women. Although there are substantial inter-regional
differences, about 90 percent of suicides in China are rural, and these young women are affected
two times more than young men. Although psychiatrists frequently attribute suicide to mental
illness, suicide can also be viewed as a social indicator. There are numerous anecdotal accounts
of suicide from the Maoist era of political chaos, affecting particularly intellectuals and rightists
cadres in urban China. This seems to suggest that high rates of suicide may well represent a long-
term trend in that country. However the fact that a disproportionately high percentage of rural
women commit suicide speaks to the working of a particular conglomeration of social factors
specific to contemporary rural China. These include, among others, long-term patriarchal
influences, recent economic reforms and their adverse consequences for certain susceptible
families, state-imposed birth control policy, and preference for sons over daughters, and the easy
availability of pesticides as a lethal method of suicide. Suicide may be considered a strategy of
resistance by women who feel powerless in situations of political and social domination. This
paper aims to understand suicide and other social health problems as a result of the effects of
large scale social forces transforming local moral worlds in such a way as to alter the
interconnection between the moral, political and medical underpinnings of social and individual
experience.
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 3

Suicide as Resistance in Modern China

Suicide is a universal phenomenon of human kind that has been shown to have different
causes and consequences. Depending on the observer’s disciplinary bias and discursive context,
the life of a suicide examined microscopically can support different casual interpretations – thick
craniums or excess phosphorus in the brain for physicians in the nineteenth century (Farberow,
1975), depression or borderline personality disorder for a modern psychiatrist, negative cognition
for a psychologists, anomie for a sociologist, patriarchy for a feminist, or a change of meaning
for an anthropologist. Political and Economic factors may affect how readily a death is ascribed
to suicide. Suicide is considered as a strategy of resistance by the powerless individuals in
situations of political and social domination.

At the collective level of social statistics, nonetheless, it has been repeatedly shown that
suicide rates can serve as an index of societal problems, such as economic downturn, political
violence, social chaos, and the current phase of global capitalism (Desjarlais et al., 1995). Emile
Durkheim (1987), the great French sociologists and anthropologists who was active early in this
century, describe kinds of suicides which represented, he surmised, responses to anomic tensions
of social breakdown and others that responded to socially approved opportunities to altruistic
action. The ratio between the youth and elder suicide also varies with respect to society
(Desjarlais et al., 1995). And, even if the two societies have the same suicide rates, the local
causes, meanings and impacts of suicide can still be quite different (Baechler, 1979). As a social
index, suicide may therefore be indexing different things across societies.

Suicide in modern China

Suicide has long been seen by Western civilizations as a disease of the mind. It is
understood by doctors and psychologists to be the tragic last act of people suffering from mental
illness or depression. In China, suicide is traditionally viewed as a protest against unjust social
order, not simply an affliction of the mentally anguished (Chinese Women and Suicide, 2013).

Suicide rates in Hong Kong and Taiwan are relatively stable and comparable to the global
average. This may suggest that Chinese people are not particularly prone to suicide. But data
made available in China since the early 1990’s have suggested a very different picture.
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According to the World Bank’s The Global Burden of Disease study (Murray & Lopez,
1996), there were 343, 000 suicides in China in 1990, about three times the global average,
making suicide the fifth most important health problems in the country. Among women it is a
greater source of lost workdays than common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.
Young rural females are particularly high risk: for those 15-35 years of age suicide accounts for
more than 20 percent of all deaths (Phillips et al. 1999). China is the only country in the world
that reports higher rates of suicide in women than in men. It has also been predicted that suicide
rates will continue to rise in the next decades. Data on suicide in China have challenged a
number of entrenched facts and theories in the west. One of these is gender ratio. In most
western countries, male suicides outnumber female suicides by three to five times (Murray &
Lopez, 1996). John Baechler (1975) wrote that:

Women endure misfortune better than do men. Their social roles require them to face unbearable
problems less frequently. As daughters, wives, and mistresses, and conforming to the dependency
which nature and culture encourage, women have a greater tendency to reach their ends by the
threat of trying to kill them. Dangerous and aggressive behavior generally is not a characteristic
of women.

In more recent years, psychiatrists have trivialized female suicidal behavior as ‘manipulative’,
‘hysterical’, or ‘psuedocidal’ (Wolf, 1975).

Why do so many young Chinese women feel compelled to take their own lives? It is
because in Western cultures, most women are provided with opportunities for education and
employment. They are encouraged to go to school and gain a literacy and knowledge of various
academic and professional subjects, and are readily encouraged to participate in corporate and
career-oriented positions. Western women are surrounded by countless public female role
models who advocate positive messages toward women (Chinese Women and Suicide, 2013).

Unfortunately, women in China are not so well-equipped to deal with the mounting
pressures of an increasingly powerful market economy. The beginning of the twentieth century
in China paved the way for a rapid change from the rural, traditionally-rooted rural societies of
the past to one of the most powerful capitalistic governments in the world (Chinese Women and
Suicide, 2013).
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 5

Suicide in China also casts doubt in the notion that social isolation, crowding, and laxness
of social control lead to more suicides in urban than rural areas. Suicide was relatively higher in
urban areas because the urban way of life was more transitory and impersonal, and left
increasing numbers of individuals socially isolated from their fellows and hence vulnerable to
suicide (Taylor, 1988). Although suicides maybe less likely to be reported in rural than in urban
regions, the rural rates of suicide are three-fold the urban rates (Phillips et al. 1999).

Suicide is also notable in this time because the rates are going up in many developing
societies together with rates of alcohol abuse, illicit substance abuse, violence, sexually
transmitted diseases, and depression and anxiety disorders, ass what called ‘the downside of
capitalism’ and the traumatic social health consequences of global change (Desjarlais et al,
1995).

There is a reason to suspect that the rate during the chaotic and destructive time may well
have been even greater than it is at present though the subgroups of people most affected could
be different in the two periods. Although psychiatric epidemiologists speak of baseline rates, this
idea is of dubious validity from the standpoint of anthropology. It assumes a societal state of
changeless equilibrium that is contradicted by the experience of Chinese in this century, which
has been one of near constant but different societal change (He, 1998).

Suicide as Resistance

Unlike Durkheim’s classic theory of suicide which has been criticized for leaving out
individual motives and their relationship with social values (La Fontaine, 1975 & Baechler
1979), recent anthropological theory emphasis that human experience is intersubjected: people
live in close relation to others in local worlds and what is at stake at those worlds affects what is
at stake for individuals (Kleinman & Kleinman, 1997).

Seen in this anthropological way, suicide can be understood as a means of resisting social
power and thereby as a strategy in the intersubjected struggles of everyday social experience.
The phenomenologist Max Scheler (1971 [1928]) argued that resistance is a part of ordinary
existence.
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 6

Suicide as a social resistance has been interpreted as occurring in different Asian

societies. Although China is often left out of such interpretation, there are in fact, various
historical examples of suicide as resistance in the Chinese tradition (Lin, 1990).

Findings

After hours of research the proponent of this study gathered enough information or
example on how suicide used as a resistance in Chinese society. There have been newspaper
reports of group suicides of Chinese farmers in Hunan to protest enforcement of laws preventing
burials of family members in ancestral lands that the local states now regards as too valuable for
agricultural purposes (Liu & Li, 1990). He (1998) suggested that suicide may constitute
resistance against the exploitative components of traditional culture and the downside of China’s
economic reforms.

Liu and Li (1990) cite one example on women who are feeling utterly helpless that take
suicide as an alternative way to escape their problem. Zhou was arranged by her parents to marry
a man she did not love. Despite her resentment, she was forced to accept the marriage.
Afterwards, she tried hard to develop feelings for him, and did everything she could to be a good
wife. However, her husband was a habitual gambler who scolded and quarreled with her all the
time. This case demonstrates that suicide maybe the last strategy used by disempowered women
in oppressive marriage situation.

Teenage suicide may represent yet another form of resistance against rural parents who,
being socially disadvantage of them, invest heavily and hold high expectations of their children’s
academic performance (Liu & Li, 1990). Studies estimate that somewhere between 6-10% of
Chinese youth attempt suicide. One article from The Journal of Adolescent Health showed that
family conflicts were the leading indicator of whether or not a child was likely to attempt
suicide. Failing to meet parents’ expectations was less influential than suffering from poor family
relations, which is contrary to what I expected considering the pressure placed on children to
perform in school (Seeing Red in China, 2012).

The birth-control policy may also interact with marital problems in leading to suicide. For
example, elder sister Liu killed herself with poison after discovering that her younger sister had
an improper relationship with her husband Zheng. After her death, younger sister of Liu
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 7

cohabited with Zheng illegally. She got pregnant later and desired to keep the child. Since,
Zheng already had a son; he was reluctant to accept this future child for fear of being punished.
She reacted by poisoning herself (Liu & Li, 1990).

One more example that Phillips et al. (1999) cite, on how the low status and limited
options of rural women contribute to suicide. A 38-year-old illiterate rural woman killed herself
by taking insecticide in 1994 after protesting uselessly against her husband’s extramarital affair
with another woman in a neighboring village. Her heavy household responsibilities then fell on
their 16-year-old daughter who was unable to stand the hard work and her father’s physical
abuse. After making seven pairs of cloth shoes for her younger brothers as a parting gift, she
joined her mother by taking the pesticide as well. Rural women may use suicide to resist
despotism outside of the family as well.

The driving force behind female suicide in China can be traced to a variety of reasons,
one of the most prominent being an easy availability of pesticides. Pesticides are a common tool
for farmers in rural villages used to keep crops safe from harmful insects. Studies show that of all
Chinese suicides, both male and female, 58 percent use pesticides. It acts as a poison that
instantly burns the mouth and throat and is extremely lethal. Researchers have discovered that
large numbers of female suicides in China are merely impulsive, whimsical acts with no
premeditation or mental illness involved (Chinese Women and Suicide, 2013).

The One Child policy in China also contributes significantly to the phenomenon of so
many women committing suicide. Families are allowed one child, and that child is expected to
be a boy. If a woman gets pregnant again after having one child, she is faced with the very tough
decision of either aborting the fetus, abandoning it at birth or moving to another country to have
the child. Because families in rural areas are extremely poor and could never afford to travel
internationally, women turn to abortion or abandonment. These practices undoubtedly lead to
extreme emotional problems in women and most likely are a major source of impulsive suicidal
decisions (Chinese Women and Suicide, 2013).

Another factor that contributes greatly to the issue of increased female suicides in China
is the general lack of social resources available to women to help them cope with their problems.
In America there are help lines, Women’s centers and community programs to help emotionally
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 8

or physically battered women cope with their problems and receive counseling. Women in
Chinese rural areas are generally not allowed to interact with many people outside of their
husband’s family. It can be a very stressful and traumatizing situation, especially if the marriage
is not a happy one, or if she is not liked by her husband’s family. Women in rural villages largely
do not have the tools they need to express themselves within their communities. Women are
expected to work hard within the home, doing all the cooking, cleaning and sewing. Such strains
can put serious pressures on young women who feel bewildered and abused in these situations
(Chinese Women and Suicide, 2013).

Conclusion

There can be no universal theory of suicide, and no one needs to be cautious of over
generalizing in a society as many-sided and complex as China. Suicide is not always social
resistance, and may be associated with remorse, disgrace, and serious mental disorders (Phillips
et al, 1999). Despite its high rates, suicides afflict only a tiny portion of rural Chinese people
nowadays. A far more common alternative form of resistance adopted by rural people is, in fact,
rural-urban migration.

Nor do all rural women succumb to arranged marriage. Apart from work migration,
Gilmartin and Lin (1997) found that women have increasingly used marriage migration as a
means of effecting upward social and economic mobility, and many of them have indeed been
successful. Migration in post-reform China may therefore be considered a collective strategy for
different things. Resistance against institutionalized mechanisms of discrimination that have
been rationalized within state socialism and that place peasants at a great disadvantage create
new options and also hearken back to traditional methods of peasant reaction (Solinger, 1997).

Thus, suicide may be considered one of many forms of institutionalized courses of action
that rural people use to resist, criticize, and revise rural-urban inequity (He, 1998). It would
appear that those who are better educated, more skilled or have more connections in their guanxi
wang choose to take their own lives. Recent studies in China have indeed found that suicide is
more common in ‘illiterate’ and ‘uneducated’ women (Da, 1993 & He, 1996). Although
psychiatrists would generally label these women as being ‘being at risk for ill health’, the lack of
education and social connections must be seen as one of many kinds of social marginalization.
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 9

Suicide may then be understood as a rational, if still filled with pathos, means resistance and an
expression of power by otherwise powerless people (Counts, 1980).
 Suicide as Resistance in Modern China 10

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