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Researchers’ citation

Please cite this page as:

Black, T. R. (2026). China: pediatric suicide rates, ages 0–24. Retrieved [date], from https://pediatricsuicides.ca/china/

Author identifier: ORCID 0000-0002-5681-4930
Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22672942

Download the data — every count and denominator on this site, as CSV, with notes.

China · 2010–2021 · Ages 0–24

Pediatric Suicides in China (Age 0-24)

Suicide rates for China, ages 0–24, as published by the China CDC for urban and rural surveillance points and weighted here into one national figure. These are rates without counts: no death count is published anywhere in this series, so the deaths given below are the published rate multiplied by the population it is quoted against — an estimate of how many deaths there are, not a tally of how many were seen. That is also why this page computes no confidence interval and fits no trend. The urban and rural rates it was built from are further down the page.

Importantly, there could be some significant data collection issues here; the rates are quite low, especially when the older age bracket.

FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT SUICIDE RATES BEFORE YOU REPORT ANYTHING!

Suicides are expressed as "# per 100,000 per year," but in some jurisdictions this means that we are converting very small numbers into rates (14/400,000 population, for example). Because of this, small changes in numbers of death can create 'bumpy' rate charts. The whole purpose of the confidence intervals and statistical significance on this page is to help you understand what is simply noise and what may be a true change.

This chart groups age "0-24" suicides, but it's important to note that 0-24 is really not what we are looking at. Suicides under 10 are extremely rare (<1 per million person years), and suicide rates increase with age all the way to age 24. So the "pool" of 0-24 is describing 19 year old suicides (12.3 per 100,000) more than it's describing 10 year old suicides (0.4 per 100,000), by a large margin. It is best to think of the "0-24" number as including young children but mostly being older adolescents.

Be cautious comparing jurisdictions like states or countries; there are huge differences in culture, methods available, ethnicity, poverty, and other variables. It's even been shown that religious coroners are less likely to adjudicate findings of suicide than non-religious coroners!

Media recommendations for responsible coverage - SAVE: Suicide Prevention, Information, and Awareness

Years shown

Sex

Ages

Uncertainty

Show 95% CI

Trend

Show fitted trend

First period

Second period

Value labels

Label numbers

Trend fitted over

Years tested

Comparison window

Female: In 2021, the rate was 1.58 per 100,000 per year. Male: In 2021, the rate was 1.84 per 100,000 per year.

Show the numbers behind this view

Latest year available: 2021 (1.72 per 100k/year)2021 (latest year)1.72/100k/yearages 0–24

Highest year on record: 2021 (1.72 per 100k/year)Highest year on record1.72/100k/year2021

Estimated deaths in 2021: 7,095Estimated deaths, 20217,095the published rate times the population — an estimate, not a count

Urban and rural, which is what was actually published

China publishes these rates for urban and rural surveillance points and never for the country. The national line above is these two weighted together by the 2020 census split of the child population; this is what went into it. Wherever the weights are wrong, the national rate still lies between the two lines below — a weighted average of two numbers lies between them whatever the weights — so the distance between them is the honest measure of how much the weighting can be worth.

Suicide rate per 100,000 per year, ages 0–24, 2010–2021. Rates as published for each place; the China line is the two weighted together.

In 2021 the two places are 1.56 and 1.81 per 100,000, and urban is the higher of them. Whatever the true split of China's children between the two, the national rate has to sit between those numbers, and it comes out at 1.72. The gap between the places is widest in 2011, at 34% of the national rate, and which place is higher changes 2 times across 2010–2021 — so this is not a country with a settled urban–rural difference in child suicide, and a weighting error cannot push the series consistently one way.

Every death figure in this section is estimated, not counted.

Every death figure in this section is estimated, not counted. No count is published anywhere in this series — the source prints rates. Each number in the deaths columns is that published rate multiplied by the population it is quoted against, which says how many deaths there would be if the rate held across that population. It is not a tally of deaths anybody observed, and it is why nothing on this page carries a confidence interval: the rates come from a surveillance system that watches a sample of the country, so the deaths actually seen are a fraction of the numbers below and an interval computed on the larger number would claim a precision nobody has.

The numbers behind this section

Year	Urban rate	Rural rate	China	Est. deaths, urban	Est. deaths, rural	Est. deaths, China
2010	1.43	1.31	1.39	4,459	2,119	6,578
2011	1.15	1.59	1.30	3,530	2,558	6,087
2012	1.16	1.37	1.23	3,509	2,179	5,688
2013	1.27	1.43	1.32	3,776	2,240	6,016
2014	1.07	1.16	1.10	3,111	1,809	4,920
2015	0.92	1.17	1.01	2,643	1,786	4,429
2016	0.88	1.01	0.93	2,479	1,530	4,008
2017	0.85	1.01	0.91	2,388	1,533	3,921
2018	0.96	1.01	0.98	2,653	1,525	4,179
2019	1.47	1.28	1.40	4,038	1,907	5,945
2020	1.70	1.49	1.63	4,618	2,200	6,818
2021	1.81	1.56	1.72	4,826	2,268	7,094

Human-reviewed8 September 2026review process vetting-v1

Every page on this site was looked at by me, one at a time, before it was published. This is exactly what that involved, and what it did not.

What I checked

The numbers, year by year: deaths and the population they are counted against, from the file the page is built from.
That the arithmetic agrees with itself. A rate equals its deaths over its person-time, every interval contains the rate it belongs to, the sexes add up to the combined figure, and no year appears twice or goes missing. These are checked by machine on every build, and I read what it reports.
The case definition and the age band, against what the source publishes, and whether either changes part-way through the series.
The source, its link and the date it was retrieved.
Every chart view the page offers, drawn, and read.
WHO's own grade for the country's cause-of-death data, where there is one, and whether the page reads more confidently than that grade allows.
The prose, against the numbers it describes.

What I did not

I did not re-obtain the primary source documents or re-key the data from them. Where a national statistics office publishes a figure, this site carries that figure.
This is not a re-analysis. I have not attempted to correct, adjust or model around a country's counting; I have shown what it published and said what I know about how it was counted.
Being reviewed does not mean a series is comparable with any other. It means I have looked at it and said what it is.

Automated checks ran over every page and I read their output. A language model was used on some pages to suggest things worth a second look; nothing it produced is published, and nothing it said stands as a finding on its own.

A review is a point in time. If the data behind a page changes afterwards, the page does not ship again until it has been looked at again — that rule is enforced when the site is deployed, not left to memory.