What’s behind China’s school knife attacks?

A woman has attacked at least 14 children in a stabbing spree at a playgroup in central China, local police have confirmed.

The attack took place on Friday at 9.30am local time, at Yudong New Century kindergarten in the city of Chongqing.

The children were “slashed as they walked back to class after their morning exercises”, CNN reports, adding that “videos circulating on Chinese social media showed small children bleeding from severe cuts to their faces”.

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Many of the children were in a serious condition. “Some news outlets in China claimed that two of the youngsters had died,” The Daily Mirror reports, but this has not been confirmed.

Knife attacks at schools in China are commonplace. In April, nine students were killed at a school in Shaanxi province by a 28-year-old man wielding a knife, and in June a man killed two children near a school in Shanghai.

“At the back of each parent’s mind, there is a tangible reason to think that each time they drop off their children at school, it could be the last time they see them,” The Daily Beast says. “So far, only one thing is clear - attacks on school kids are now the norm in China.”

The spike

The frequency of knife attacks appears to have risen dramatically since 2010.

The spike began in March of that year, when Zheng Minsheng killed eight students at a primary school in Fujian province. “Zheng’s trial was swift, and he was sentenced to death,” says The Daily Beast. “On April 28, 2010, he was executed.”

But on the day he died, a similar attack occurred in Guangdong province. Sixteen students and a teacher were wounded, and in the next two years, 25 people were killed and more than 100 injured in a spate of unconnected attacks, the BBC reports.

Since 2010 there have been at least two attacks every year and at least 43 children killed in total, leading some to believe that the initial 2010 incident “inspired multiple copycat attacks”.

Social stress and mental illness

Media outlets and experts are often quick to attribute the attacks to mental illness and China’s poor handling of it.

“In China, there’s little focus on mental health, so more potential offenders slip through the cracks,” Quartz says. “An estimated 100 million Chinese have varying degrees of mental illness... but China has a fraction of the number of mental health professionals compared to developed countries.”

After the 2010 attack, “questions were abundant” over the attacker’s mental health, says The Daily Beast, but the state-owned Xinhua News Agency was quick to pin the blame on “failures in his romantic life”.

Explanations such as these are common. The Straits Times says experts in China have pointed to “anxieties caused by social upheaval and persistent inequality in explaining the attacks”, while The New York Times says assailants are sometimes said to be “trying to vent anger at society over issues such as unemployment”.

The China Internet Information Center, often a conduit for Chinese government statements, claimed in 2010 that “modern social stress” was behind the consecutive attacks. “People suffering from mental disorder could also attack people, but the suspects of recent cases made careful plans,” it says, suggesting that “attacking children was a way the stressed people call for attention and help”.

There is some evidence to support the argument. According to one witness to today’s attack, the female assailant was heard shouting that “the government had treated her unfairly”, the South China Morning Post reports.

What has Beijing done?

The government “has been slow to stop these knife attacks”, Quartz says. “In 2010, outgoing premier Wen Jiabao identified vaguely-described ‘social tensions’ as the root cause. But growing inequality, land seizures by the government, and out-of-control housing prices remain issues.”

The attacks have “led to calls for more research into the root causes of such acts”, the Straits Times reports, but adds that the government has instead opted to tighten security at schools. This includes installing gates and cameras and training guards to fend off attackers using a long metal rod with two prongs at the end that are used to pin knife-wielding attackers.

The Chinese government also often blocks access to online news of the attacks. “Several were censored by state media for fear of copycat attacks, while online discussions were also blocked,” The Independent reports.