The hero of Nanjing

The Nanjing Yangtze river bridge is four lanes wide and four miles long, a monument to Maoist endeavour clogged with the traffic of China’s economic boom. And every weekend, at one of its two towers, you can see Chen Si. He is 42 years old, with spiky black hair, a rasping cough from cheap Nanjing-brand cigarettes, and a baseball cap bearing the slogan ‘THEY SPY ON YOU’. Around his neck is an oversized pair of binoculars, through which he watches the crowds unceasingly. In the past six years, according to his blog, he has saved 174 people from suicide.

Mr Chen used to be a functionary at a transport company. He read one day in a newspaper that Mao’s famous bridge was now a suicide spot, and shortly afterwards began to go there whenever he wasn’t working and pull down suicidal people as they attempted to climb the railings. He has become celebrated — a concerned citizen taking a stand in a country with 200,000 reported suicides a year, and few good ideas about how to stop them.