In the most recent case, a former deputy Communist Party secretary in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia region of China, slit his wrists in his government office on Monday, the state news media reported.

While the data is incomplete — there are no official figures — the numbers suggest that the suicide rate among the country’s mid- to top-level officials is at least 30 percent higher than the overall suicide rate in urban areas, according to statistics from Hong Kong researchers.

“A lot of officials have varying degrees of corruption problems, and now the risk of being investigated is always there,” Qi Xingfa, a researcher at Shanghai’s East China Normal University who studies suicide among officials, said by email. “They are reading about a case in the paper in the morning and by afternoon the official is in detention. It’s really frightening, and people don’t know if they will see the end of the day. After a while, the guilt of corruption may lead an official to kill himself.”

Experts caution against pinning the suicides on any one cause, noting that multiple factors may contribute to any one case. But most agree that the numbers are striking.

“Officials are members of society too, and there may be all kinds of reasons for them to kill themselves,” said Ren Jianming, director of the Center for Integrity Research and Education at Beihang University. “They may fall victim to depression and social pressures. But I think that recently the anticorruption movement has been a major reason. I have never seen anything like it.”