A 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed on his way to school in Shenzhen on Wednesday, September 18. He died the following day. The attack occurred on the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident, which precipitated Japan’s invasion of China. It was the second deadly stabbing attack on a Japanese school in the past four months: in June, a Chinese school bus attendant, Hu Youping, was murdered while protecting Japanese students from an attacker in Suzhou. Chinese authorities have called both cases isolated instances without offering any detail on the attackers’ motives and little on their background. Months after Hu’s death, censors continue to delete questions about her killer, so-far identified only as “surname Zhou (male, 52-years-old, unemployed new arrival to Suzhou).” The attacks have followed a year of rising anti-Japanese sentiment, at times fanned by the government, after Japan released treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Online, many discuss the return of the “U-lock” mentality, a reference to the 2012 anti-Japanese riots in Xi’an which saw a Chinese owner of a Japanese-made car severely beaten with a bike lock. 

CDT has collected a mass of censored and uncensored essays on this latest attack. This will be the first in a series of posts translating, interpreting, and contextualizing online Chinese reactions to anti-Japanese violence. 

Before news broke of the victim’s death, the WeChat blogger Haoxuan Insights (昊轩洞见, Hào Xuān dòngjiàn) wrote an emotional essay on the violence against Japanese schools, drawing connections between anti-Japanese television series, opportunistic right-wing influencers, and “mindless” hostility to Japan: 

Hello, everyone. It’s September 18, 2024, and there’s some infuriating news.

This morning, a student in the fifth grade at the Shenzhen Japanese School was attacked by a 44-year-old Chinese man while walking to school alone. The scene of the attack was only 200 meters from the school itself.

At the moment, the victim is undergoing treatment in hospital and the suspect is in custody. His motive is unconfirmed. We don’t know if he likes anti-Japanese shows in which the “invading devils” are torn apart with bare hands, if he hates people who wear kimonos, or if he applauds natural or man-made disasters when they strike Japan. We don’t know if he idolizes the chaotically incontinent “Tietou” [“Iron Head,” a Chinese influencer who urinated on a pillar at Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine before graffitiing the English word “toilet” on it].

A 44-year-old man attacking an elementary school fifth-grader truly makes your blood boil. It’s fair to say it’s utterly inhumane.

Faced with such a case, one can’t help but recall the attack on a mother and son waiting for a school bus at the Japanese School of Suzhou on June 24. And then there’s the heroic Ms. Hu Youping, who fought the knife-wielding thug to protect the other children on the school bus, and paid for it with her life. After that tragedy, Japan’s embassy in Beijing lowered its flag to half-mast in tribute to her.

The unexpected thing is that almost three months after Ms. Hu’s death, we still have no concrete information about her killer. We don’t know whether the killer followed influencers who like to stir up anti-Japanese hatred, or whether he enjoyed shoddy, hate-filled anti-Japanese devil-ripping shows.

The saddest thing is that the Suzhou school-bus attack, and Ms. Hu Youping’s sacrifice, had already prompted the Shenzhen Japanese School to step up security on the street outside the school, but it still wasn’t enough to stop a similar tragedy from happening again. The boy attacked in Suzhou was a preschooler, and he still hasn’t recovered from his injuries. The victim in this latest attack was in the fifth grade. Why do these villains always target the old and weak, women and children—have they lost all humanity?

From the time a Yang Mama congee shop [in Shenyang] hung a sign wishing Japan a long pandemic, to the mindless boycott of Dalian’s Japanese Style Street, to the malicious attacks on women wearing kimonos in Suzhou and elsewhere, to barring people in kimono and geta from comic conventions, to Tietou pissing all over the place … it’s the same thing, over and over again.

There are some hate-filled people who screech that China and Japan are utterly different and cannot coexist, and who are mindlessly hostile to anything Japanese except militarism, which they embrace. They lump the militarists together with ordinary Japanese, and spread hatred for the whole race. They’re vulgar and despicable, cheering any disaster that strikes Japan, applauding the assassination of former Prime Minister Abe, wallowing in Schadenfreude, and even heaping praise on his assassin. They harass Japanese tourists taking photos at the Old Summer Palace, and demonize Chinese who wear kimono and geta or like Japanese culture. Their madness has grown and expanded, to the point that they are now willing to lash out at the weak, the elderly, and the captive.

Truly, it makes you bristle with rage. These hate-filled people have lost all humanity, having fallen so far that they would attack the elderly and the weak. Some of them even claim that this latest attack was orchestrated by the Japanese themselves. It’s really the ultimate limit of ignorance and shamelessness.

Before Ms. Hu Youping’s murderer has even been publicly identified, another, similar incident has taken place. This shows that mindless anti-Japanese hatred is clearly as common as ever. We need to thoroughly eradicate those inciting it and punish those who spread hatred or propagate extreme nationalism. If we fail to do so, the same tragedy will only keep recurring. [Chinese]

In a now-censored post on his WeChat blog, the veteran reporter Zhang Feng wrote that xenophobic violence diminishes Chinese cities—especially when speech restrictions make it impossible for non-nationalists to say “I’m sorry”:

I read a post from a Shenzhen blogger who wrote “I’m sorry” about the death of that Japanese child. It was censored and then reposted, only to disappear again later. 

I saw photos of people leaving flowers. In Suzhou, people also left flowers. Now they’re doing it again in Shenzhen. Even though leaving flowers is not nearly enough, it’s seemingly the only thing that can be done. 

What’s tragic is that in the photographs of flowers, the school’s name has been obscured. The security guards worked diligently, and kept removing the bouquets left [by mourners]. 

Only one word on the “Shenzhen Japanese School” sign is still visible: “Shenzhen.” It looks a bit lonely, stripped of its meaning and devoid of emotional support. 

Mourners will still come. They won’t be able to see the words at the bottom of the sign, so the flowers they’re leaving will be for “Shenzhen.” That, in itself, is a kind of critique. If Shenzhen is to become truly prosperous, it must be tolerant, capable of listening and, most importantly, capable of expressing itself. 

This made me finally realize what Shenzhen is missing: although it is a huge city, it does not deserve to be called a “great city” because it is incapable of expressing itself. 

Because it cannot say “I’m sorry,” it doesn’t know how to love.  [Chinese]

Samuel Wade contributed a translation to this post.