Background: The causes of suicide may differ for individuals.Classifying suicide death may help make population-based suicide interventions.Methods: Totally 392 suicide victims and 416 living comparison subjects (both aged 15-34 years) from 16 rural counties of China were included in this psychological autopsy study.Two informants were interviewed for each of the subjects to collect their demographic, social and psychological information.Classification Tree was used to explore suicide types.Eighty percent of the sample was used for training sample while other twenty percent was for test sample.Results: Five different types of suicide were found in rural young population in China, two of which as followings account for 76.6% of suicide death: hopeless people no matter whether with or without mental disorder (64.8%) and people with mental disorder but with less desperation (11.8%).Hopelessness was more important than mental disorder in classifying suicide.Sensitivity of this suicide classification tree in training sample was 84.34%, and its specificity was 92.08%.This classification tree was validated by test sample, and its sensitivity and specificity were 76.47% and 85.92%, respectively.Conclusion: Other than mental disorder, hopelessness should be paid more attentions in suicide risk assessment and suicide prevention.