Mass suicide among Party members

More than 1,200 members of the Communist Party have killed themselves and 8,000 have fled abroad during the first half of 2003, according to the Beijing oriented Wen Wei Po in Hong Kong, reports Reuters and many other news media.
And then people worry about the chicken flu. On 65 million Party members it might not be that many as a percentage, but the totals are staggering anyway.
It is one of the first times that this kind of figures are released. The fight against corruption has taken on a rather serious character since the new government got into place at the beginning of last year.