[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/health/flu-deaths-2017--2018-...
Starving to death is indeed very, very rare in the United States.
80,000 people is less than 1 in 3750 Americans — I’ll take my chances with those odds over living somewhere with regular famines.
Then why do Chinese farmers line up outside the gates of factories hundreds of miles from home in the hope of getting a job? If farming gave them an equivalent or better quality of life, they would just stay at home and keep farming.
The intensity of farm work isn't even comparable. You aren't toiling in the fields doing the same exact thing for hours every day, every month, every year like you do in a factory. Most labor happens during harvest and planting seasons, maintenance labor throughout the year is focused on improving your living conditions or other local projects, something you can't do if you are working for the factory. Unfortunately, things come up that can only be fixed with immediate or continued access to capital, so you have to send one of your family members hundreds of miles away to work in a factory to fuel an emergency fund. The problem with farm work isn't the work, it's the lack of enough pay to deal with disaster.
Because they've been forced to relocate from their farms to manufactured cities by the government which then bulldozed their villages.
Then once they're in the city, their choice is to work in the greenhouses of a big government-backed company, or work in the factory of a big government-backed company.
There are many documentaries about this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Suicide rates are also very biased by how employers, friends and family, and authorities handle the death.
Across many cultures people tend to underreport suicides - but to different extents.
It's also worth noticing that some behaviors leading to death like overdose, heavy drinking and dangerous activities are not counted as suicide but sometimes they share the same psychological conditions.
As a related note, during the worst year, Foxconn had 930k workers, and 14 deaths by suicide, so approximately 1.5/100k.
In the US, all age groups above 14 have a suicide rate over 10/100k.
Coincidentally, the same seems to be true in USA - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...
Urbanization is a powerful force; it happens because people want to leave the rural life behind, and as it continues, it pushes the contrast ever more in favor of urban life; people move to the cities because of the opportunities, economy and culture there; and as they do so, they "carry" even more opportunities, economy and culture away from the rural areas to these cities.