Less than a week after a shocking “Xianzhong” car attack that left 35 dead in Zhuhai, a recent graduate of a Jiangsu technical school stabbed eight people on the campus to death. On Tuesday, a man rammed elementary school students with his car in Hunan, leaving several injured. These are just the latest in a longer string of similar incidents. The back-to-back-to-back attacks have provoked soul searching on Weibo, where many have asked, “How can we solve this?”:
李庄：One after another. How can we solve this? It calls for reflection. @JintangPeople’sProcuratorate, @JintangPeople’sCourt, @GuangdongProvincialHighPeople’sCourt, @ChengduMunicipalIntermediatePeople’sCourt, @XingtaiIntermediatePeople’sCourt, @XingtaiXinduDistrictCourt, @JinanMunicipalPeople’sProcuratorate, @LixiaProcuratorate
亿苇杭之：For the past few years we’ve mocked “Imperialist America” every day … and now?
老汉彭于晏：In America the free, every day’s a shooting spree.
炸号的尾鱼读者：I can’t remember where I read this but, “Society has become a pressure cooker, one spark and it will explode.”
游泳池里喝咖啡：Reflection? In your dreams.
月下叟11：How can you say there’s been no reflection? Haven’t you noticed all those new surveillance cameras? Or all those added police patrols?
二郎神VS悟空：It happens extremely infrequently, seeing as there are over one billion people.
九运A：According to netizens, there have been 20 incidents this year. From 2018-2023, there were only between four and six per year, which means the frequency of these events has increased by four or five times. I’m afraid we can’t just shrug these off as isolated incidents.
木可南只有一个：Social strife has intensified, and there’s no release valve for all that pent-up resentment.
月朗风清五柳庄：Government spokespeople always claim these are just isolated incidents.
树格拉底：The “lords” stay safe, as always.
用户7845796031：Instead of solving problems, they get rid of the people [who point them out]! Just look at those poor depositors at Henan’s rural banks: they were given “red health codes” [a zero COVID–era restriction that forced the bearer into lockdown], beaten up, and even locked away. It’s been 800 days and they still haven’t been allowed to withdraw a single penny.
口音很重吗：Ordinary people just trying to get by have become isolated, lonely islands, wracked with anxiety and despair. As our voices are silenced and the root causes of problems ignored, all we’re left with are these “cold statistics” [death tolls] in the news.
乾隆开挖机：The killer worked 16 hours a day in a factory and they owed him back wages, so he took his revenge on society. His last will and testament is so “sensitive” you’re not even allowed to read it.
少嘴臭我：When the economy’s bad, social conflict surfaces. When the economy’s good, everything’s fine. Public safety doesn’t come from “strike hard” campaigns.
云端的树懒：The angry and downtrodden turn their knives on those even weaker. [Chinese]
The Jiangsu stabbing, like the Zhuhai ramming attack, was attributed to the economic woes of the attacker by terse police statements. The motive of the Hunan attacker remains unclear. Steven Tsang, head of the SOAS China Institute in London, told The Financial Times: “The thing that seems to stand out is that people are resorting to such mass violence because they seem to feel that they don’t have much to lose.”
Just as after the Zhuhai massacre, authorities have studiously censored footage of the Jiangsu attacks and suppressed public mourning for the victims. Discussion of the elementary school ramming attack in Hunan has also been strictly censored. Hashtags reading “Crash at a school entrance in Hunan Changde” were censored and replaced with a hashtag used by official media that read, “Changde crash perpetrator arrested.” Authorities have also strictly censored serious reflections on the attacks. At Reuters, Brenda Goh reported on the public reactions to the attack, as well as official efforts to suppress them:
Qu Weiguo, a Fudan University professor, said the recent cases of “indiscriminate revenge against society” in China had some common features: disadvantaged suspects, many with mental health issues, who believed that they had been treated unfairly and who felt they had no other way to be heard.
“It is important to establish a social safety net and a psychological counseling mechanism, but in order to minimize such cases, the most effective way is to open public channels that can monitor and expose the use of power,” Qu posted on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
The short essay had been removed by the censors by Sunday afternoon. [Source]
At the Wall Street Journal, Yoko Kubota interviewed CDT’s Eric Liu on the censorship that has accompanied the attacks:
“In China, one of the original motives for tight controls on the internet is to clamp down on anyone voicing doubts about the Chinese government’s ability to govern,” said Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times, a website tracking Chinese censorship.
“No matter what happens, only the official narrative is allowed to be discussed, otherwise it will be taken down,” said Liu, a former censor for Weibo, China’s X-like platform.
[…] In recent weeks, the Communist Party’s censors have been sending reporting guidance on such attacks to government-run media, requiring their reporting to align with police statements, people familiar with the matter said.
“The information of the perpetrators that hasn’t been disclosed by the authorities, such as financial situation and marital status, shouldn’t be reported to speculate on their intention, or to relate to other incidents or broader social issues,” according to an official instruction seen by The Wall Street Journal. [Source]
The spate of killings has drawn the attention of China’s top leadership. After the Zhuhai attack, Xi Jinping issued a rare directive ordering local authorities to prevent conflicts from escalating before they explode. After this morning’s ramming attack in Hunan, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate held a meeting after which it promised to “strictly and swiftly punish major vicious crimes,” and then ordered procuratorates to study the spirit of Xi Jinping’s instructions on the Zhuhai attack.
