Nothing is more horrifying and evil than purposefully slaying children in groups. Yet in China, five such crimes occurred across the country in the past 40 days.
On March 23, eight elementary school students were killed by a man at the gate of their school in Nanping, Fujian; April 12, several elementary school students were injured in front of their school in Hepu, Guangxi; April 28, another man injured 16 students and school teachers in Leizhou, Guangdong; April 29, one man attacked 32 people in a day care center in Taixing, Jiangsu, including dozens of toddlers and teachers; and then the next day, in Weifang, Shandong, yet another man attacked students and teachers in an elementary school.
State media only confirmed eight deaths of children, but bloggers in China claim the actual number is much higher. They were not killed by gun, since firearms are strictly controlled in China. They were killed, and others injured, by knives and a hammer.
A blogger, who appears to work in a day care center not far from the attacked one in Taixing, gave a vivid account of how four men, instead of just one as reported by state media, slaughtered toddlers with knives. While the state media were reluctant to confirm any deaths in the Taixing incident, the blogger claimed at least five small children were brutally murdered.
The entire country was shocked, the public outraged, parents terrified, while media, including the blogosphere, lashed out at the crime—it was cruel, cold-blooded, evil, and totally insane!
Scholar Yu Jianrong warned that the Chinese society is in a mental disorder and psychological crisis, as people living on the edge of the society are seeking revenge not just against society, but against humanity.
Writer Zheng Yuanjie wrote a song that reads: dear daddy and mommy, I am going to school. I hope I will be safe, and come home alive… There was speculation that those people attacked children at the “good schools,” implying that the attackers intended to harm children of powerful and affluent families. But soon there were others claiming most of the children in those schools come from ordinary families.
For some pundits and bloggers, the crime is rooted in social injustice, as income gap and disparities in social status continue to widen in Chinese society. But for others, blaming society is misleading, and those who committed the crime should be condemned and punished as most vicious murderers, and can never be excused behind the shield of social injustice.
Any one of those killings would be shocking and tragic enough for a country with 1.3 billion people, when such cold-blood crimes were deliberately committed against children: the most vulnerable and innocent members of our society. Yet we had five in a row in slightly more than a month!
When thousand of babies were sickened by melamine-tainted formula just less than two years ago, we already saw how a money-making-driven society can do wrong to children. Sadly for China, that was still not the end of the slippery slope. And now we see knives hurting those small bodies and we see blood, children’s blood. But is this the end? How many children have to die before we can realize something deep is seriously wrong with the society in China and really do something to stop the country from falling into hell?
Wake up, people! And stop hurting our children!!
– Blog
– CCTV story
– Scholar comments
