China: Why are men slaughtering schoolchildren?

China’s rash of vicious knife assaults on kindergartners “shocks the senses and defies imagination,” said the Hong Kong South China Morning Post in an editorial. In the past three months, six different middle-aged men have burst into a school and stabbed little children at random. Last week, a man armed with a meat cleaver attacked a kindergarten in Hanzhong, in central China, hacking to death seven 5-year-olds and two adults. Eight children were stabbed to death in March, and dozens wounded. The crimes seem to be “copycat” attacks, but there’s no clear pattern: The perpetrators have included the unemployed, farmers, and a doctor, while victims were children of rich and poor families. “The only undisputed commonalities are their viciousness and evil nature.” Clearly, China is in the grip of a “deep social malaise, and soul-searching questions need to be raised about the state of mainland society.”

In a democracy, such a horrific trend would inspire intense “social criticism and debate,” said Huang Hung in TheDaily Beast.com. But China is run by a repressive Communist Party that fears free speech, so the attacks at first stirred “a backlash against freedom of the press.” An official government website blamed the killings on “sensationalist reporting,” and there have been calls for stricter regulation of the media and even for an outright ban on the reporting of violent crime. Still, some issues are just too big to be contained, and experts and average citizens alike are trying to understand the possible motives for this vicious killing spree. After all, “to kill children in a country with a one-child policy is a knife aimed at everyone’s heart.” Those who commit such acts are making “the most desperate kind of cry for public attention.”

These brutal crimes reflect the spreading “anxieties, frustrations, and tensions” in modern Chinese society, said Chinese sociologist Xueguang Zhou in The New York Times. China is “experiencing social transformation at a scale and speed that its long history has rarely witnessed.” Millions of people are relocating—or, sometimes, being forcibly relocated—from rural areas to the cities, where they live in dire poverty within sight of the gated mansion communities of the obscenely wealthy. “Desperation and resentment now run deep.”

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We can only hope that the deaths of so many innocent children shock the government into action, said Shi Chuan in Henan province’s Dahe Bao. All the killers apparently had been “treated unfairly or bullied by the authorities.” They were “unable to take revenge on the government departments, which are safeguarded by state security forces,” so they “unleashed their hatred and anger on weaker people.” If bureaucrats would act with compassion, free of corruption, perhaps people would not be driven to these unthinkable acts. This is a wake-up call for local authorities, said the Beijing China Daily. They must try harder to “redress individual complaints” and soothe “latent public anger.” Only when Chinese society is “fair and equitable” will we be able “to root out such atrocities.”