An October 8 stabbing outside an elementary school in Guangzhou, in which two nine-year-old students and an adult woman were injured, has drawn renewed attention to the phenomenon of indiscriminate knife attacks by people seeking “revenge on society.” All three victims received medical treatment and are reportedly out of danger. The perpetrator, a 60-year-old man surnamed Zhao who served over six years in prison for a previous stabbing attack on a girlfriend, was arrested by local police, but the official police statement about the incident and arrest was very short on details.
The Guangzhou stabbing follows a spate of other attacks on students, foreigners, and various other innocent bystanders in China. In many of these cases, official public statements also seemed deliberately vague, and online reporting and discussion of the attacks were heavily censored. This was particularly true of attacks in which the motivations seemed to involve anti-Japanese or anti-foreign sentiment—the non-fatal stabbing of four American teachers in a Jilin park in June, the stabbing that injured a Japanese mother and child and killed a Chinese school-bus attendant in Suzhou in June, and the fatal stabbing of a 10-year-old Japanese boy in Shenzhen in September. A September 30 attack in which a man stabbed 18 people at a Shanghai Walmart, killing three and injuring 15, was described by police as being motivated by a “personal financial dispute.” Later reporting, some of it deleted by platform censors, revealed that the man had lashed out in indiscriminate rage after failing to collect a large sum of back-wages and having to sell his cell phone to buy food.
A recent article by blogger and former journalist Zhang Feng, “Censorship Won’t Make Us Feel Safe,” notes that vaguely worded police statements and online censorship of reports on these attacks deprive the public of essential information and undermine their sense of agency. A portion of Zhang’s article is translated below:
In the attack on elementary-school students that occurred in Guangzhou, those injured were a male student, a female student, and an adult woman who was at the school to pick up her children. The 60-year-old perpetrator was arrested.
But the official police statement said only that “three members of the public” were injured. There was no mention of the fact that two of those injured were nine-year-old elementary-school students. The site of the attack was also deliberately downplayed, with the statement only hinting that the incident occurred at the entrance to a school.
It’s fair to say that the police took great pains to prevent the public from realizing that this was an attack on minors—as if that [subterfuge] might prevent similar incidents from recurring.
The Caixin news report was much more informative. Not only did it note that two of those injured were nine-year-old elementary-school students, but it also provided more specifics about the site of the attack: the school itself is located in Guangzhou’s Zhujiang New Town, and there were many people at the school entrance when the attack occurred. A woman bleeding from her injuries chased the perpetrator, and she was soon joined by two construction workers wielding tools, and eventually by some security guards from a nearby hotel. Working together, they managed to subdue the attacker until the police arrived.
Many parents pitched in to comfort the children who were just finishing up their school day, and some who had come to pick up their own children also helped by fetching their children’s classmates from school and accompanying them home.
All of these individuals deserve to be seen—they should not be described as some faceless members of the “general public.”
The police report used the vague term “general public” in order to tamp down public sentiment and make people feel safe. But a genuine sense of safety depends on the participation of everyone in society. Caixin’s report won’t “spread fear” among the public, but rather, will inspire public confidence.
[…] So how do we attain a sense of safety and security? We can’t do it by plugging our ears and deceiving ourselves. Nor will lumping individuals into some vague collective category like the “general public” make us safer. On the contrary, it decreases transparency. A safe society is built on trust, and depends on people seeing and helping each other. In this way, desperate people will be less likely to fall into dire straits, and if an attack does happen, more bystanders will be willing to lend a helping hand. [Chinese]
