ON JUNE 24th Wei  Jianghong, [seen above] chairman of a large state-owned copper smelter and a delegate to the national legislature, jumped to his death from a building in Anhui province. It was at least the 62nd publicly known “unnatural” death of an official or employee of a state-run entity since the beginning of 2013, according to Chinese media reports, and at least the 32nd suicide among those deaths.
The local police said the results of a preliminary investigation and a suicide note indicated he committed suicide due to “excessive work pressure and mental stress”. Speculation immediately began swirling online as to what might have caused enough stress for Mr Wei, who was 52, to kill himself. The most likely reasons mooted were difficulties at his publicly listed enterprise, Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group, or a corruption inquiry. Either way the job of being a Chinese official seems to be rather too stressful for some, and especially so since Xi Jinping became Communist Party leader in 2012 and launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that appears to have lost none of its intensity. Surveys already suggested that officials feel under stress and less happy than society as a whole. Mr Xi’s corruption crackdown will have added to their anxiety.
One of the party’s highest-ranking members, Zhou Yongkang, a former security chief and former Politburo standing-committee member, is believed to have been detained along with his son and members of his patronage network. On June 18th the New York Times reported that Mr Xi seems to have got members of his own family to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in the wake of a report in 2012 by Bloomberg, a news service, about their wealth.
Lurid reports of official graft often surface. In May Caixin, a business magazine, reported that Wei Pengyuan, a senior official of the National Energy Administration’s coal department, was under arrest. So much cash was found at his home in Beijing—100m yuan ($16m)—that investigators brought in 16 machines from a bank to count it all. The disciplinary commission of Shanxi province reported this month that from January to April this year it punished twice the number of officials at city level as it had in the same period last year.
Whether this dragnet is leading directly to an uptick in suicides is the subject of much online gossip. Several of the 32 suicides are definitively linked to corruption investigations. One was Liu Zhanbin, the president of a state-owned pharmaceuticals company in north-eastern China. On May 18th, two days after being placed under investigation for corruption, he claimed to be sick and was taken to a hospital, where he slipped away from his guards and jumped from a third-floor window. Other suspected suicides include a city vice-mayor and senior officials at the State Council Information Office, China Railway Group, the state petitions office and Xinhua, the official news service.
Most suicide reports come with only the explanation that the official was “depressed”. The vagueness is no accident: on May 10th propaganda authorities issued a directive that media use only the official accounts of such deaths and conduct no independent inquiries of their own, according to China Digital Times, an American website that frequently receives word of internal propaganda instructions.
Those under official scrutiny for corruption may have taken another factor into account: protecting their ill-gotten gains for their family. Under Chinese law, corruption investigations end if the suspect or defendant dies.