ABSTRACT
As I remarked in Chapter 1, by studying suicide in today’s China, I want to provide a new theory of suicide from a Chinese perspective. As a fundamental issue about the meaning of life, suicide is closely related to some basic philosophical ideas of human existence. Western suicidology is not appropriate to explain the Chinese phenomenon because the understanding of these ideas is different in China. Before digging deeper into the reality of Chinese society, I will examine the philosophies of suicide, both Western and Chinese.
