The two speedy executions and two death sentences (one suspended) meted out to several men who committed mass-casualty attacks late last year have attracted thoughtful commentary from Chinese legal experts and current-affairs bloggers. Much of the commentary, critical of the Chinese government’s desire to under-publicize and sweep these cases under the rug, argues that rushing such cases through the courts undermines public faith in the judiciary and prevents a wider discussion of the underlying socioeconomic issues that may have contributed to the crimes.

Both executions took place on January 20, scarcely two months after the respective attacks occurred. One of the men executed was 62-year-old Fan Weiqiu, who killed 35 and injured 43 in November of last year when he plowed his SUV into a crowd of people exercising outside of a sports stadium in Zhuhai, Guangdong province. Immediately after the attack, Fan stabbed himself in the neck, but survived. His reported motive for the indiscriminate murders was anger over the division of property in his recent divorce settlement. The other man executed was 21-year-old Xu Jiajin, who killed eight students and injured 17 others in a November 2024 stabbing spree at a vocational college in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, where he had once studied. Police later stated that Xu targeted the school because he had been denied a diploma there and was resentful about a low-paying internship.

Three days after the executions, a court in Suzhou, Jiangsu province handed down a death sentence to Zhou Jiasheng, a 52-year-old man who attacked a Japanese school bus last June, injuring a Japanese mother and child, and killing school bus attendant Hu Youping as she attempted to thwart the attack. Zhou, who traveled to Suzhou from neighboring Anhui province to carry out the stabbings, was reportedly bent on “seeking revenge” after he fell into debt and lost the will to live. News of the death sentence as well as the attack that prompted it—including to what extent Zhou was motivated by anti-Japanese xenophobia—was suppressed in China, although both the attack and the subsequent verdict were covered extensively by Japanese media outlets. The Suzhou stabbing was followed by a similar stabbing attack in Shenzhen in September, during which a ten-year-old Japanese boy was killed. Both attacks prompted an outcry over xenophobic violence and soul-searching about the unchecked spread of anti-Japanese and other anti-foreign content on Chinese media platforms.

In late December, a court in Changde, Hunan province handed down a suspended death sentence to Huang Wen, who drove his car into a crowd of elementary school students and parents in November, wounding about 30 people, 18 of them children. At the time, news and videos of Huang’s attack—which was said to be motivated by his investment losses—were deleted from Chinese social media platforms, and official statements about the attack were short and uninformative. Despite the many injuries, there were no deaths resulting from Huang’s attack, and his suspended death sentence will likely be commuted to life in prison.

The cases described above were among the most prominent of the numerous “revenge on society” attacks that took place in China in 2024. Such indiscriminate, high-casualty attacks are sometimes called “Xianzhong attacks,” after a Ming-era rebel with a legendarily bloody reputation. CDT Chinese editors have compiled a (non-comprehensive) list of at least 25 attacks that occurred last year, in which 86 people were killed and 181 others injured. (In some of the attacks, no official figures were ever released, making it difficult to ascertain the number of deaths and injuries.) At the time, news of these attacks was heavily censored and information released to the public—such as the perpetrators’ identities and motivations, or the identities and ages of the victims—was minimal. CDT editors chose the innocent victims of these attacks as our “2024 People of the Year.” In addition, many of 2024’s most notable censored articles and essays concerned mass-casualty attacks.

Several recent articles archived by CDT Chinese editors discuss various aspects of the attacks, prosecutions, death sentences, and executions. An article from Aquarius Era (now deleted from WeChat, but still available on the @aquariuseras Substack newsletter) is a deep dive into the Wuxi vocational school stabbing attack, the psyche and motivations of attacker Xu Jiajin, and the online communities that may have shaped him. The article’s authors describe the facts of the attack, first-person recollections from victims and witnesses, and a number of security failures at the school. They also dig through what is known of Xu’s life, online and off: his heavy indebtedness and “serial borrowing”; his complaints about being exploited as a low-paid intern and being denied a diploma when he failed to complete the school’s required internship; and his various online interests and influences, which seem to have included left-wing philosophy, dark humor, manga, “otaku-left” culture, and Chinese self-described “ronin” who use VPNs to circumvent the Great Firewall.

An article from a WeChat blogger and criminal defense lawyer, titled “Public Disclosure Is More Important Than Harsh, Expedited Punishment,” argues that the expedited trials and hasty executions of Fan Weiqiu and Xu Jiajin undermine public trust in the judicial system and deny the public better insight into the legal system, the facts of these particular cases, and the underlying socioeconomic factors that may have prompted the crimes:

In the past two days, some of my colleagues have shared news in their WeChat Moments about two recent death-penalty executions, casting a pall over the joyous [Spring Festival] atmosphere.

The two cases that resulted in executions were: the case of a Mr. Fan who, on November 11 of last year, plowed his car into a crowd of people in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, striking and killing dozens of people; the other was the case of a Mr. Xu, who committed a knife attack on November 16 of last year in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, that resulted in multiple deaths and injuries.

In the aforementioned two cases, only slightly more than 50 days elapsed from the commission of the crimes to the sentences of execution being carried out; the processes of investigation, prosecution, first and second appeals, and death-penalty reviews were carried out very rapidly indeed.

Afterward, the notable legal scholar Liu Yanhong published an article titled "Particularly Vicious Crimes Should Be Punished Quickly and Severely in Accordance With the Law." Professor Liu’s viewpoint is that in these two cases, severe and rapid punishment is called for, given the vicious nature of the criminal offenses involved.

[…] Pondering that viewpoint, I would argue instead that the primary task in handling such major, sensitive criminal cases is public disclosure, rather than severe, expedited punishment.

1. Only through full disclosure can the public gain an understanding of the facts of the case

Taking the aforementioned two cases as examples, official reports reveal that [Zhuhai stadium vehicular attacker] Fan had sought “revenge against society” because of the breakdown of his marriage and his unhappiness with the division of assets in the divorce settlement. [Wuxi vocational school attacker] Xu returned to his former school with a knife, seeking revenge because he had been denied a diploma and was unhappy with his low-paying internship.

I believe that if the entirety of these two cases had been broadcast live, it would have been an excellent way to promote public understanding of the law. First, it would have helped the general public to better understand the facts of these cases; and second, it would have allowed the general public to supervise the judicial process.

[…] Unfortunately, the two trials were not open to the public, and the only details to be gleaned were from media reports, so there was no way for members of the general public to gain a full picture of the facts of the cases. Take me, for example: even as a criminal defense lawyer, I wasn’t particularly moved by news of the executions of the defendants in those two cases. It was only natural that I wouldn’t feel moved, because I lacked a full picture of the facts of the cases.

[…] 2. Public disclosure is essential to dispelling doubts

Many years ago, the establishment of China Judgments Online (CJO) marked the beginning of a new era for judicial openness in China. Unfortunately, along with the decline of CJO in recent years, there continue to be problems such as restricted seating for members of the public who wish to observe trials, and defense lawyers missing their clients’ trials because they have been waylaid by intrusive security checks. As such, many trials now proceed in a manner that is “ostensibly public, but in fact secretive.”

Even if the outcome of such cases is fair and impartial, such an atmosphere of secrecy is bound to raise suspicions [of unfairness].

[…] Only openness and public disclosure can dispel these suspicions. Harsh, expedited punishment cannot dispel suspicion, and may even raise doubts about whether the facts of the case were investigated sufficiently.

3. Full public disclosure is essential to underpinning judicial authority and enhancing public confidence in the judiciary

[…] The cognitive abilities of ordinary people in China have improved a great deal over the years. They are more than capable of forming their own independent judgments and participating in discussion and oversight of public affairs. Just as in the case of a family with grown children, parents must not infantilize their adult children, nor fail to acknowledge their children’s independence. Taking an overly patriarchal or matriarchal approach will not succeed in bolstering “parental” authority, but may risk destroying the family relationship.

Likewise, in the judicial field, the only way to bolster judicial authority and inspire public confidence in the judiciary is to hold truly “open” trials and allow the public to meaningfully participate in the judicial process. Otherwise, the courts are just engaging in a self-aggrandizing monologue.

In summary, full public disclosure is more important than harsh, expedited punishment. [Chinese]

Lastly, a recent WeChat article by Zhang Feng, a Chengdu-based blogger and former journalist, discusses the death sentence handed down to Suzhou school bus attacker Zhou Jiasheng. How was a man like Zhou created, the author asks—was he the product of an “information bubble” filled with toxic, xenophobic, nationalistic content? Zhang also mentions overhearing a nationalistic video recounting the (almost certainly apocryphal) 2004 “Nanjing McDonald’s battle” in which Chinese students beat up some Japanese men who were supposedly hurling insults at Nanjingers. (That story has taken on a life of its own and continues to be spread—in various iterations—on Chinese social media platforms, despite censors’ avowed crackdown on anti-Japanese online content.)

The man who attacked students on a Japanese school bus—and was thwarted by bus attendant Ms. Hu Youping, who he ended up killing—was sentenced to death today.

This wasn’t reported in the Chinese media. I read the news on Nihon Keizai Shimbun’s (Nikkei’s) official WeChat account.

The report also said that the perpetrator, a middle-aged man from Anhui, decided to take revenge on society because he was “tired of being in debt.”

What the report didn’t mention was what being in a desperate financial situation or being “tired of being in debt” have to do with attacking Japanese elementary students on a school bus. Perhaps it can be understood this way: since he didn’t want to go on living, the attacker figured he might as well go out in a blaze of glory and become a “national hero."

Such people are, of course, despicable, disgraceful, and extremely dangerous. It seems imperative that we figure out what makes people act like that.

Here’s a topic worth studying: Are narrow-minded, fanatical nationalists more likely to fall into dire economic straits?

Or to put it the other way around: Are people living at the bottom rung, struggling to survive below the poverty line, more likely to be xenophobic?

I think both statements make a certain amount of sense, in that the “bottom rung” suggests circumstances that are not only economically impoverished, but also “information-impoverished”—and subsisting on a diet of one-sided information, of course, makes one more inclined to be narrow-minded.

In 2023, for example, many people were terrified to eat Japanese food because they thoroughly believed that the discharge of nuclear wastewater from Japan had polluted the world’s oceans. Others speculated about when this nuclear radiation would begin to affect China’s coastal waters.

Take a look at news reports from that time by the Global Times and many local metropolitan newspapers and you’ll see how “selectively” they reported on the topic.

Despite the fact that leading scientific institutions—led by the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency—conducted sampling and confirmed that there was no danger, many Chinese people were caught up in a frenzy of “alternative information.”

Just before [Zhou Jiasheng] was sentenced to death today, there was another piece of news: Chinese scientists who sampled and tested the waters off Fukushima, Japan, announced that they had detected no harmful substances.

Let’s take a look at how the Global Times reported it. While obliged to “objectively report” on the news, the Global Times added this caveat: “The results of a single test are of limited value …” [Excerpt from the Global Times report:] “Experts also pointed out that Japan’s discharge of Fukushima’s nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea is unprecedented. Japan’s unilateral action in initiating the discharge was both illegitimate and unreasonable, and when it comes to science, it is essential to take a cautious approach. The results of a single test are of limited value, whereas international testing carried out under the IAEA framework is a long-term process. China and other stakeholders will continue to participate in and carry out independent sampling and testing.”

I have no evidence that the man from Anhui was a regular Global Times reader, but he is clearly exposed to a torrent of misinformation and biased opinion.

A few days ago on the subway, the man next to me was watching a video. He had the volume turned up so loud that I can almost recount the entire story:

A Chinese college student working part-time at a McDonald’s in Nanjing (many of the fictional stories in these nationalistic videos seem to take place in that particular city) heard a Japanese man insulting Nanjingers in Japanese. The student then proceeded to beat up the Japanese man, to the cheers and applause of a crowd of onlookers.

The Japanese man called the police, but when they arrived, they found that the video surveillance system was broken, so they had to interview the crowd of witnesses—all of whom agreed that the Japanese man had started the altercation. The police officer ended up giving the Japanese man a stern lecture.

Such an obviously fabricated story not only cheapens the image of ordinary Chinese citizens, it also slanders the police.

It not only breeds hatred, but also exacerbates stupidity and poverty. And the tragedy is that this sort of content is rife on all video platforms. Many Chinese people pass their time watching such content, unaware that it is slowly warping their worldview.

It is likely that in the foreseeable future, Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations will warm up a bit. China may well resume importing seafood from Japan, but these media reports, like toxic nuclear waste, will take decades to dispel. [Chinese]