Objective: College students are often at high risk for suicidal ideation, which preceeds behaviour.While US college students have been studied a great deal, less is known about Chinese university students--Physicians, psychologists, administrators, and others must often determine whether students are at risk for suicide ideation in time-pressured situations such as short office visits, the end of sessions, or in informal encounters.--In order to do this effectively with a relatively small handful of questions, it would therefore be useful to know the subset of attitudes toward suicide that are most strongly associated with active ideation.--We investigated this in a survey of about 17,000 Chinese university students at over 60 different institutes in China.Methods: The participants were 17405 first year graduate students in Chinese Academy of Science ages 18 and older (M=25, SD=3.21) with 64% were male.Subjects were asked to finish the incoming questionnaire with name, age and gender.Measures Suicide attitude-Suicide Attitude Questionnaire, QSA-F1 Suicide Ideation-1-item "I want to die" with choices "yes" or "no".Depression-Self-rating Depression Scale, SDS; Logistic regression-First set of models: Logistic regression models predicting ideation from each single attitude item,-Second set of models: same as first, but adjusting each item for age and gender-Third set of models: same as second, but adjusting each item for age, gender, depression.Results: The results showed that 4 suicide attitudes were predicted suicide ideation significantly: "I think suicide is crazy"(negatively); "I think suicide tramples on living dignity" (negatively); "Its understandable to suicide when life is no more cheerful" (positively) and "I think its ones right to suicide" (positively).Discussion: Items 1, 2, 8 and 9 in QSA-F1 showed the strongest patterns of associations with suicidal ideation.Item 1, 2 were negatively and item 8, 9 were positively associated with suicide ideation of students.It suggested the favourable attitudes connected with suicide ideation.The attitudes were believed to have influence on behaviour, so the students with positive suicide attitude may could be considered more risky than the one with negative attitudes.On the other hand, attitudes were also considered as an internal state that results from learning, so this result also supported the idea of preventing suicide by influencing the attitude of suicide.-Clinicians, administrators, and others should ask about these attitudes when dealing with suicidal students.This result suggested an indirected way to ask suicide ideation.-The limitations of the study are that it is a cross-sectional study and longitudinal replication may need.The huge sample and multi-site could be the strengths of this study.