A 21-year-old worker for the Foxconn Technology Group - maker of parts for Apple's iconic iPhones and iPads - died last night after falling from a dormitory at a building in Shenzhen.
It was the ninth suicide leap at a Foxconn facility since the beginning of the year. Seven of the suicide attempts have been successful. The other two resulted in severe injuries.
Yesterday's incident occurred despite the company having set up a 24-hour counselling hotline and introduced a policy of paying employees to report on colleagues they think may have psychological problems.
Police found a bloodstained knife at the scene of the leap and stab wounds on the victim's body. Police were treating the incident as a suicide, Xinhua reported.
The death was the third suspected suicide attempt in nine days by a worker for Foxconn, which employs more than 400,000 people in Shenzhen. Last week, two 24-year-olds, a woman and a man from Hunan and Henan , leapt to their deaths - one from a rented apartment, the other from a dormitory at a Foxconn facility in Shenzhen's Longhua district.
The string of deaths has sparked an outcry on the mainland. In an earlier report Xinhua said they underlined the frustrations felt by young rural migrants who had left their families to work long hours in factories far from home.