Things began to go wrong when she was forced to marry a man she did not love.Then only 20, Zhang Xiaoyun had to leave her family and friends to live with her in-laws. She didn’t know or particularly care for her new husband, so it was only a matter of time before feelings of helplessness and resentment grew.
What’s more, as a woman living in rural China, Zhang had no status in her community. She was a second-class citizen, expected to cook and clean for her husband. There was no place for independence or even a personality of her own.
So Zhang did the only thing she could think of to escape – she tried to commit suicide.
Zhang survived, but many like her do not. China is the only country in the world where more women kill themselves than men. Every year a staggering one million women there attempt to take their own lives. Upwards of 150,000 are successful. That’s one suicide every four minutes.
Most occur in rural areas, where women struggle with poverty, abuse and rigidly patriarchal traditions that see females as worthless and subservient. Without any social support system or rights of their own, these women suffer in silence.
Family disputes and economic pressures are often the main factors in suicide. And an alarmingly high number of women are pushed over the edge by seemingly minor quarrels with their husbands or in-laws – everything from a fight over mahjong to a disagreement about what to watch on television.
That’s because suicide doesn’t have the same taboo around it that you’d find in Western countries. In some parts of rural China, drinking pesticide is an almost normalized way of dealing with pent-up frustration.
It’s an impulsive act of desperation – a cry for help – from wives with nowhere else to turn.
These women don’t necessarily want to die, but they are alone and lack a sense of self-worth, so few think of the consequences. It’s hard, after all, to understand the value of your own life when no one else considers you valuable.
Many marriages in rural China are still arranged, while other brides are simply sold off. Both practices are illegal, but these customs are hard to break. And once a woman is married, gaining the acceptance of in-laws is a tall order in the face of high expectations and little respect.
Few of these women will ever benefit from the development and prosperity springing up in other parts of the country. On average, a rural woman who attempts suicide has just five years of schooling and a median per capita income of $13 a month.
For these women, suicide is a way to escape from China’s suffocating shadows of discrimination and anonymity.
Though one organization is trying to change this. The Beijing Cultural Development Center for Rural Women is an NGO that promotes social development for females in rural areas.
It offers literacy classes, skills training and mentorship, all in the name of giving rural women the sense of empowerment they need.
“They don’t have self-confidence and feel their lives are meaningless,” Chen Shanshan of the Beijing Center said in an e-mail interview. “We try to help them recognize themselves and realize their potential.”
There’s even a suicide prevention program that tours the countryside showing women the value of life and teaching communities about gender equality and inclusion.
So far the center has helped some 5,000 people, including a much happier Zhang Xiaoyun, who is no longer suicidal.
But there remains a lot of work to do. The first step is to bring the plight of these women into the open. Too many of them are suffering in silence as China continues to modernize at an unprecedented rate.
Gross national product and international trade may be ways for a country to determine its economic wealth, but true well-being can only be measured by the quality of life of its citizens.
Until this well-being is taken seriously, and until China tackles gender
discrimination, alienation and inequality, the nation’s development will remain woefully incomplete.
No country should be able to call itself “developed” when a million of its citizens every year find suicide is their only option.
