BEIJING — China’s Communist Party is on suicide watch as President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign permeates the government and bureaucracy.
The party is asking local cadres to identify the number of “unnatural deaths,” including suicides, of party members in the two years from December 2012, according to notices published on government websites.
The time period coincides with the anti-graft drive launched by Xi soon after he became general secretary of the party in late 2012 and warned the party was at risk if it didn’t tackle corruption. The campaign, which has broadened to senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army, has snared at least 100,000 “flies and tigers,” or low- and high-level officials.
“There’s a growing number of official suicide cases reported over the past two years as the anti-corruption campaign intensified,” said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University in Beijing. Some officials don’t want “to expose the people behind them, so the easiest way is to commit suicide to protect people above them and their family members.”
The South China Morning Post reported in November that the deputy commissar of China’s navy, Vice Adm. Ma Faxiang, was believed to have committed suicide less than three months after another senior officer fell from a building at a naval complex in Beijing. The paper cited a retired officer it did not identify as linking the Ma news to the anti-corruption drive within the military.
Party officials are instructed to complete forms in which they are required to fill in eight columns including name, sex, rank and working unit of the deceased, along with the time and reason for death, according to the notices on government websites.
If the death is deemed suicide, further columns need completion including the location and method of death, plus the status of the investigation into the matter.
Officials must try to identify the reason for the suicide from options including involvement in illegal activities, psychological disorders, work pressure, life pressure, family issues or other reasons.
For suicides that took place during disciplinary investigations, officials were asked to note whether the probe was against the deceased or a family member or colleague.
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