Objective: The present study aimed to compare the prevalence of suicide ideation among Chinese graduate students from the year of 2007 through 2010 and explored the stable related factors of suicide ideation of graduate students.Methods: The prevalence of suicide ideation and attitude towards suicide of graduate students majoring in various disciplines were assessed by scales consecutively.Personality traits, general mental health status, and depression symptom were also assessed to examine the relevance to suicide ideation.Logistic multivariate regression was performed for data analysis.Results: From 2007 to 2010, the sample size of the survey for each year was 11210, 8991, 9642 and 8678 respectively.The annual prevalence of suicide ideation of graduate students was 5.4%, 1.1%, 0.9%, and 1.1% respectively.The percentage of graduate students who have very positive attitude toward suicide was 4.8%, 3.3%, 2.5%, 2.7%.The higher suicide prevalence rate was found in female group as well as in the higher grade groups of master students and PhD students.Regression analysis showed that grade, general psychological health status, depression status as well as personality were all significantly correlated with suicide ideation.The correlations among these variables were stable through years indicating that psychological distress, depression and some of personality characteristics were the stable risk factors of suicide ideation.Conclusion: The results of this study confirmed that the poor mental health status especially, depression symptoms would be the risky factors for the suicide ideation.The data indicated that the prevalence of suicide ideation dramatically reduced after the year of 2007, when the large scale mental health promotion program in higher education institutions was introduced since 2008, suggesting that such promotion program would be a potentially effective way for suicide prevention and intervention.Funding: This study is supported by research fund (Y029017EA2) and China Collaborative Suicide Research Training Program (D43 TW007273) granted to the first author.