With the Robin Williams suicide dominating news last week, the news about suicide in China is fairly upbeat. Once the world leader in numbers of suicides, the suicide rate has declined significantly from the 1990s.

Hong Kong University issued a study this year showing the annual suicide rate in China had dropped from 33 per 100,000 people in the 1990s to a current rate of 10 per 100,000 people this year.

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Determining the official suicide rate in China, it turns out, is no simple matter. The China Ministry of Health and World Health Organization haven't published official suicide statistics in 15 years. Still, researchers at Hong Kong University's Centre for Suicide Prevention drew on various published sources to conclude that China's suicide rate had dropped more than 60 percent over the last 10 years.

While suicide in China gets a lot of media play, researchers believe the massively falling rate runs contrary to the usually accepted caveat that suicides increase when societies become modernized. Common perception is that people confronted with rapidly changing societies have trouble coping and take their own lives.

Tsinghua University sociologist Jing Jun believes modernization and relocation of many people from rural to urban areas actually lowered the suicide rate. Rural residents had accounted for the majority of suicides in the country. Upwardly mobile people with brighter economic futures were less likely to kill themselves, according to Jing and others.

Urban suicides also have dropped in China. Hong Kong University researchers found those fell to around five suicides per 100,000 people in the last 10 years. Despite factors like air pollution and high housing prices, general satisfaction with city living accounted for the drop, according to Jing.

Another, perhaps surprising, reason for the decline in suicides is the breakup of traditional extended families due to urbanization. Fewer members of extended families in the same home or vicinity actually left people more content because they had fewer family struggles, Jing said.

The drop in suicide rates may not last forever, sociologists say. The decline in extended families and rise in one-child households may leave elderly people more likely to kill themselves. The stress of modern living in general also may cause the rate to climb. However, researchers agreed that China's suicide rate probably won't return ever to the extremely high levels of the 1990s.

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