Background: With the rapid development of social economy and culture, university students in China face many challenges together with pressure of competition, leading to increased stress that many students could not cope well.The existing evidence shows that suicide rate in university students in China is 2-4 times the rate in peers who are not attending a university education.Yet some factors have been reported to be associated with suicidal behaviour in the young people, the influence of negative events experience in childhood is poorly understood.A better understanding the role of negative life experience during childhood will beneficial suicide prevention and treatment in this group of population.Methods: 1179 college students at a university in Wuhan city are selected using stratified cluster sampling method to attend a questionnaire survey.Personal information on suicide ideation and attempt, a number of negative life experiences in childhood and other variables are collected.Chi-square test, correlation analysis and logistic regression are employed to explore the relation between negative event experience and suicide behaviour.Results: The results show that, 26.5% students have ever thought about suicide seriously or attempted suicide, and the rate is significantly higher in girls (30.6%) than boys (19.6%).43.7% of all students report positive to the studied negative life experiences during childhood.Suicidal behaviour is more common in students with childhood negative life experiences than those without such experiences (32.4% vs.22%, X2=13.54, p<0.01).Significant negative life experiences include poor relationship between mother and father, family economy problem, experience of sexual assault or sexual abuse, and serious physical disease.Other negative experiences such as divorce of parents and death of a parent are not significantly different between suicidal and non-suicidal students.Overall, suicidal students experienced more childhood negative life stresses than counterpart students without a suicide ideation or attempt and further logistic regression analyses indicate that a positive report of childhood negative life is significantly associated with the risk for suicide behaviour in university students (OR=1.65, Cl: 1.39-1.94).Conclusion: Suicide behaviour in university students is a serious mental health problem, for which negative life experiences during childhood play an important role.The results suggest that university programs about mental health education, suicide prevention and intervention should pay more attention to students childhood negative life experiences.