I look through the window down a light shaft and cringe with vertigo. The shaft, its outlines broken by a net of clothes lines and window frames, is cold and silent. It would have been where Wang would have ended a five-year battle against severe depression.
He is not alone. He belongs to a startlingly large emerging legion of depressed urbanites in the Middle Kingdom. More than 26 million people have been diagnosed with depression throughout the country, according to figures released by the China Medical Association at a summit meeting of Asian psychiatrists last month.