by Akan Ido
A Chinese high school student apparently committed suicide while preparing for a lesson according to a video uploaded online.
The pupil was shown sitting motionless for a while before making it to the window reportedly killing himself. The reaction of his fellow students and the chaos which followed backs up the claim that the boy leapt from a window.
The that part of the classroom where the boy made the leap is out of shot.
Classroom horror: Pupils are settling down for a lesson, unaware that one among them is planning his suicide
Read the Daily Mail report below:
Some run to the window to peer out, others run from the room, while one simply paces while clutching her head in her hands.
One student comes to the front of the class where he points at the teacher and shouts something at her. MailOnline did not have a Mandarin speaker on hand to translate.
A description of the video says: ‘High school student Xiao Zhen leaps to his death from a a window in the middle of class. It is believed this happened due to pressure of preparing for college entrance exams.’
While the video’s authenticity cannot be confirmed, it fits with a disturbing trend among Chinese youngsters for whom suicide has become the number one cause of death.
In most countries in the West, accidents are the biggest cause of death for young people.
The unusually high suicide rate among Chinese youth has been blamed on intense pressure to succeed in school, where the education system places great emphasis on grades and status at the expense of healthy social lives.
It doesn’t take long for the boy’s classmates to realise what he has done
Pupils erupt in grief and shock at the apparent suicide, screaming, crying and some of them running out
Last November the parents of a ten-year-old boy blamed a schoolteacher for their son’s death, claiming that she had ‘told him’ to jump from a building after he failed to complete a punishment assignment.
Jun Jun smashed into a parked car beneath the flat where his family live in the Jinjiang district of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province.
China’s suicide rate has soared 60 percent in the past 50 years. According to data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention an average of 287,000 Chinese citizens kill themselves every year.
