Pesticide suicide as a relational structural event: linked lives, gendered kinship and reputational governance in...

Pesticide self-poisoning was a major cause of suicide in rural China. Although mortality has declined, little is known about how earlier suicide waves continue to shape bereaved families, kinship relations and village life decades later.

To examine how a past wave of pesticide suicides shaped linked lives, gendered kinship obligations and intergenerational inequality in rural China, and to theorise these deaths as relational structural events.

Between October 2024 and March 2025, we conducted a qualitative life-history case study in a Hunan village where multiple pesticide suicides occurred in the 1980s-1990s. After identifying all 12 known bereaved households in the relevant settlement, we interviewed 28 relatives and 7 key informants. Data were analysed using framework-informed thematic analysis, with life course theory as the primary framework.

Pesticide suicide redirected linked rural lives through four mechanisms: role substitution and trajectory resequencing in schooling, labour and care; gendered moral accounting that allocated earning, caregiving, silence and blame across kin positions; reputational transmission through village memory, marriage screening and informal governance; and unequal repair through ritual containment, kin-based rescue, informal monitoring and reverse investment in children's education.

We develop a relational structural-event model showing how sudden, stigmatised death can become intergenerational inequality through linked lives, gendered kinship, reputational governance and uneven social repair. Public health postvention matters, but the primary contribution is to theorise how suicide loss is socially transmitted across kin and community life.