A senior official has said China's university professors are being put under too much pressure, following the recent suicide of a 45-year-old female professor in Guangzhou.

Ouyang Jie, who was working at Sun Yat-sen University in the capital of southern China's Guangdong Province, threw herself off the fifth floor of a staff building last month.

One of her colleagues said Ouyang was on medication for depression after going through a divorce more than ten years ago and her only son was sent to live with her ex-husband in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province.

"She was competitive and capable, while she was also eager to outdo others. It seemed that she was overloaded with work, putting herself under so much pressure," another colleague said.

Liu Jixian, a member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) said that the assessment standards for the performance of university professors were unreasonable.

"It is improper to make regulations on how many courses and theses a professor should finish within a year. Most professors can not bear the double strain of teaching and scientific research," he said.

About 250,000 Chinese take their own lives each year, making suicide one of the major causes of death among Chinese people, according to Michael Philips, China representative of the International Association for Suicide Prevention and a consultant with the Mental Health Department of the World Health Organization (WHO).

(Xinhua News Agency February 6, 2007)