CHINESE KNIFE ATTACKS

Execution does not stop Chinese knife attacks

By Jaime FlorCruz, CNN
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May 3, 2010 10:10 a.m. EDT


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Police officers show teachers and school workers at a Beijing school how to defend themselves during an attack.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Recent spate of attacks at schools in China has prompted public anger
  
• China intensifies security at schools, issues new knife purchase rules
  
• Series of attacks blamed on people with grievances, mental illness
  

Beijing, China (CNN) -- Early in the morning on March 23, Zheng Minsheng walked in front of an elementary school in Fujian province. Wielding a knife, he attacked the students who happened to be around, killing eight and wounding several others.
Authorities said Zheng, 42, carried out the attack because he was frustrated at "failures in his romantic life," according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Whatever his real motive was, the senseless killing, reported widely by the Chinese media, shocked the nation. Zheng was tried, sentenced to death and executed on April 28.
If Chinese authorities thought Zheng's execution would deter similar attacks, they were wrong. The day he was executed, a knife-wielding man attacked elementary school students in southern Guangdong province, wounding 16 students and a teacher. The attacker was later subdued by the police, and no one died.
The next day, a man in Jiangsu province barged into a kindergarten and stabbed 31 people, including 28 students, two teachers and one security guard. "It was too horrible to imagine," one eyewitness told local reporters. "I saw blood everywhere." Police apprehended the suspect, 47-year-old Xu Yuyuan.

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Video: What's driving attacks on China's kids?

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Then, on April 30, a man barged into a village school in Shandong province, carrying a hammer and a can of gasoline. Wang Yonglai, a local farmer, attacked preschool students with the hammer, causing head injuries. He then set himself on fire and died. According to a Xinhua report, the local farmer went berserk after the local police told him that the family house he had just built using 110,000 yuan (US$16,110) of family savings had to be torn down because it had been built on farmland, which is illegal in China.
It was the third such school attack in three days.
The spate of school attacks is prompting public anger. "What is going on with these people?" Wen Jia, a father of a pre-schooler in Beijing, asked CNN. "Why take their frustrations on defenseless children? We need better security in schools, but we also need to take care of the mentally ill."
On Friday, the Ministry of Education on its website issued an urgent circular ordering kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools to beef up security and restrict strangers from entering the campuses. The ministry instructed schools across the country to hire security guards, install security facilities and ensure that pupils are escorted home. Schools are also urged to teach pupils to how to protect themselves.
Guns are strictly controlled in China, but until recently possession of large knives were not. Chinese authorities have recently issued a regulation requiring people to register with their national ID cards when they buy knives longer that 15 centimeters.Why take their frustrations on defenseless children?
--Wen Jia, father




Other measures are being put in place. In Jiangsu province, local police have helped schools set up "campus security team" composed of 70 security guards with batons and pepper spray. Police in Beijing have distributed "forks", long poles with semi-circular prongs that security guards could use to fight assailants. In Changsha, capital of central Hunan province, parents formed vigilante teams to patrol local elementary schools.
This series of school attacks are blamed on people with personal grievances or suffering from mental illness.
Says Ding Xueliang, a sociology professor in Hong Kong: "The Chinese society has generated enormous pressure on individuals and some of those individuals have perhaps had emotional and psychological problems. They want to cause general attention from the population and attacking kids perhaps is the best way from their perspective of achieving this objective."
These recent incidents are covered extensively in the local media and on the Internet, prompting concerns over copycat violence. Says sociologist Ding Xueliang: "With the mass media (reports), particularly on the Internet, more individuals are likely to copy such practice, if the Chinese government does not do things quickly and effectively."

For the terrified pupils and worried parents, the solutions are not coming quickly enough.

1] This is all so very strange. One defective individual that wants to harm children is bad enough. It is extra troubling that there seem to be several in such a short period of time.
2] Anyone else think that the idea of regulating knives longer than 15cm [not quite 6 inches] is a waste of time?

Wow. I realized as I was reading that, my eyes were like saucers. Inconceivable.

I wonder about the little kids that survive. Can you imagine being a 6-year old and witnessing classmates being stabbed to death? This is just crazy.

..now with this one I truly think something else is going on....there's just no way I think that so many random man are lashing out violently against unrelated little children....I wished Pax had something to say about this because this sounds like some sort of conspiracy to me.....unless I was thinking since reproduction is being controlled in China and there still is a large problem of overpopulation could these men have become so desentisized in their thinking that children would be an easy target ,that children are expendable?
....are the other incidents copy cat crimes of the first one?...I don't know but something's fishy.
As far as regulating knifes( any lengths),in these cases I don't think it would matter much ,wasn't a hammer used in one of the incidents?.I think knifes are different from guns,you can not accidentally stab someone and even if it's done in rage it takes a lot more to actually attack someone with a knife than to shoot from a distance.It's so much more personal.

Kay wrote:I wonder about the little kids that survive. Can you imagine being a 6-year old and witnessing classmates being stabbed to death? This is just crazy.

I was thinking about that, too. Some were stabbed themselves. Seriously stabbed. What kind of PTSD does that give a kid?? And the parents. The Chinese can be a bit paranoid, anyway. These episodes could have some major societal repercussions.

There is more to the story. I am not certain I would call it a conspiracy but there is some odd cultural dynamic here that I do not understand.

May 13th 2010 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition


A pattern of senseless slaughter



ALL month schools in China have been on what the state-controlled press calls a “red alert” for possible attacks on pupils by intruders. In one city police have orders to shoot perpetrators on sight. Yet a spate of mass killings and injuries by knife or hammer-wielding assailants has continued. To the government’s consternation, some Chinese have been wondering aloud whether the country’s repressive politics might be at least partly to blame.
In the latest reported incident, on May 12th, seven children were hacked to death at a rural kindergarten in the northern province of Shaanxi. Eleven other children were injured. It was one of half a dozen such cases at schools across China in less than two months. Three attacks occurred on successive days in late April, when more than 50 children were injured. The previous deadliest killed eight children in the southern province of Fujian on March 23rd. The killer was executed on April 28th.
This has been embarrassing for a leadership fond of trumpeting its goal of a “harmonious society”. In 2004, two years after Hu Jintao became China’s leader, he and his colleagues called for better security at schools. But occasional attacks continued. Assailants were often said to be lone, deranged, men venting their frustrations on the weak. A report last year in the Lancet, a British medical journal, said that of 173m Chinese it estimated were suffering from mental illness, fewer than 10% had seen a mental-health professional. Knives are the weapons of choice in China, where firearms are hard to obtain.
Over the May Day break, officials ordered yet another boosting of school security. The Communist Party’s law-and-order chief, Zhou Yongkang, called it an “urgent political task”. When classes resumed after the holiday, police patrols were stepped up near schools. Some hired security guards and equipped themselves with pepper spray, nets and pronged poles. In Beijing the authorities say that since the March 23rd attack they have prevented seven unspecified “incidents aimed at schools” with the arrest of ten suspects. On May 3rd police shot dead a man who took a child hostage in a residential area of the capital.
The recent violence has come at a bad time for the government, anxious as it is to project a positive image during the six-month World Expo in Shanghai, which began on May 1st. The authorities regard the expo as similar in importance to the Beijing Olympics of 2008.
The Chinese press gave little prominence to the latest killings and largely stuck to reports from the official news agency, Xinhua. Their reticence could reflect fears of copycat crimes, or simply the old habit of burying news during big events. During the Olympics, one provincial propaganda department ordered that negative reports be “strictly controlled” and that there must above all be no reports on “problems that give the Western media a pretext for launching attacks, such as issues concerning press freedom, air quality, food safety, democracy, religion and legal issues”.
But some online commentators in China have been less restrained. Han Han, one of the country’s most popular bloggers (and a huge irritant to the authorities), wrote that killing the weak was seen by the attackers as the most effective way of exacting revenge on a society “that has no way out”. He said that local governments should send the guards at official buildings to help protect schools, “because a government that can’t protect children doesn’t need so many people to protect itself.”
Even the official press has aired the odd hint of dissent. A newspaper in the central province of Henan said that while the West had many NGOs that could help people suffering from mental distress, in China there were very few. This, it said, led to problems becoming bottled up and eventually erupting in violence. But if more NGOs are what is needed to relieve China’s social tensions, the prospects now look bleak. One of the country’s most prominent NGO leaders, Wan Yanhai, has just fled to America to escape police harassment. His complaints are widely shared.

Copyright 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

claudicici wrote:..now with this one I truly think something else is going on....there's just no way I think that so many random man are lashing out violently against unrelated little children....I wished Pax had something to say about this because this sounds like some sort of conspiracy to me.....unless I was thinking since reproduction is being controlled in China and there still is a large problem of overpopulation could these men have become so desentisized in their thinking that children would be an easy target ,that children are expendable?
....are the other incidents copy cat crimes of the first one?...I don't know but something's fishy.
As far as regulating knifes( any lengths),in these cases I don't think it would matter much ,wasn't a hammer used in one of the incidents?.I think knifes are different from guns,you can not accidentally stab someone and even if it's done in rage it takes a lot more to actually attack someone with a knife than to shoot from a distance.It's so much more personal.

Its not popular to say things like this but I cant help the way I think and I tend to CONSIDER the POSSIBILITY that things like this may be more than what they seem to be. All through history we have seen tryrants get their people worked up to the point that they are able to pass draconian measures that may not have been allowed or accepted under normal circumstances.

This is referred to as the Hegelian Delect, which translates to: problem, reaction, solution. The State has some unpopular measure they want to pass (the solution) so they CREATE A PROBLEM that will result in the people REACTING in such a way that they will be more accepting of what it is the State wanted to doto begin with.


I dont know about this case as I would need to go back and look and see what was happening in Chinese politics in the months leading up to these attacks, IF there was some sort of talk of wanting to beef up security in schools, or ban knives etc, but these measures were not popular among the people then you can see how the govt then may need to create an environment were people would be more accepting of these types of measures and certainly attacking their children will get people worked up to the point that they would BEG THE GOVT to take measures that they would normally never allow the govt to even consider.


Like I said I dont mean to make light of the fact that children have been killed by turning it in to some crazy ass conspiracy theory but intelligence agencies do do these sorts of things, they are trained for it and we have seen examples of it all through history where govts, tyrants, depots etc have had to create an enviroment where people were worked up sufficiently so that they could then easily pass laws that the people would have NEVER accepted without such an environment having been created in the first place.


I will have to look more in to the Chinese political dialogue may have been in the months leading up to these and see if there was any related meaures being discussed that would require getting people worked in to a hysteria to pass them before I can really run with this but I think it is something to consider.


One great example of this was the ANTHRAX attacks on the US Congress after 9-11, those attacks have still never been solved and I believe the reason is because they were a manufactured psychological operation designed to bring about "certain ends."

In the weeks leading up to the attacks the PATRIOT ACT had been introduced to Congress and the national debate about this VERY UNPOPULAR legislation had begun. TWO SENATORS who were very much against the passage of this legislation, DASCHELE and LEAHY were leading the charge for a THUMBS DOWN VOTE on this bill in the weeks leading up to the final Senate vote on it.

ONE WEEK BEFORE the final Senate vote was to take place, the 3 major news outlets, NBC, ABC and CBS and Two Senators, Daschele and Leahy, who were AGAINST THELEGISLATION, were sent Anthrax letters. The national debate quickly changed and more support for this legislation was the result, INCLUDING those two Senators who were previously against it BEFORE getting anthrax letters sent to them, both of whom VOTED IN FAVOR of the act a week later.

I am quite certain that even was manufactured for the very reason I speak above, to get those who were otherwise against this type of legislation to reconsider their position and show support of it because of FEAR.

I agree,I don't think everything is a conspiracy...but this just seems way too many cases in such a short period of time,it really makes me think something else is going on...

Report Says 13 Hurt in Latest China Knife Attack



State media say 13 vocational students wounded in latest China knife attack


The Associated Press
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BEIJING May 19, 2010 (AP)



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At least five men armed with knives burst into the dormitory of a vocational college Wednesday and slashed nine students, one of them seriously, sparking new fears in a country on edge over a series of shocking rampages at schools.
Four students had been wounded in an earlier confrontation between the two groups, bringing the total injured to 13.
The pre-dawn attack took place in Haikou, the capital of the southern island province of Hainan, when five or six men burst into a dormitory at the Hainan Institute of Science and Technology and slashed the students, the China News Service reported.
It said eight were wounded slightly, while one's hand was cut off.
Two students remained hospitalized with wounds that were not life-threatening, the reports said.
Because it was a vocational college, the students would have been much older than the children targeted in a string of attacks at schools across China in the last two months.
The reports said the violence began with a confrontation late Tuesday between some of the college's students eating at a food stall outside the school and men from the surrounding villages. Such schools usually attract students in their late teens and early twenties.
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Four of the students were attacked with knives and police were called, but left after questioning the students, the reports said. The villagers then called for reinforcements and attacked the school at about 2:30 a.m. (1830 GMT), the reports said.
A spokesman for the Hainan provincial government confirmed the report but said he had no additional information. The official Xinhua News Agency put the number of attackers at more than 10 and said they first assaulted a guard and disabled security cameras before rushing into two dormitories where lights remained on and hacking away apparently at random.
The attack follows five separate assaults by lone assailants against schoolchildren as young as three in the last two months that have left 17 dead and more than 50 wounded, including some adults.

I was thinking today about something I read regarding the "One Child" policy in China. The first generation of "oners" are adults now, and not young adults anymore. Because the Chinese want boys over girls, it is believed that many girl fetuses were aborted and that other girl babies were outright killed or abandoned to die. The result of this on the generation at hand is that there are nowhere near enough women for the vast numbers of men of a certain age. I couldn't speak to the specific connection between this social phenomenon and the student stabbings, but it has some possibility as a psychological factor.

As for this recent incident with multiple attackers and older students... I tend to think that it has little relation to the earlier incidents, except perhaps for giving the group the idea of rushing in and stabbing multiple victims. The motive for this seems more direct: a clash between townies and students.

tapu wrote:I was thinking today about something I read regarding the "One Child" policy in China. The first generation of "oners" are adults now, and not young adults anymore. Because the Chinese want boys over girls, it is believed that many girl fetuses were aborted and that other girl babies were outright killed or abandoned to die. The result of this on the generation at hand is that there are nowhere near enough women for the vast numbers of men of a certain age. I couldn't speak to the specific connection between this social phenomenon and the student stabbings, but it has some possibility as a psychological factor.

I had considered that as well. I don't know what the exact relationship would be but I could see how a culture that devalues children in that manner could be a contributing factor to these sorts of attacks.
I've been considering the the lack of availability of firearms too. Here defective people go on mass shooting sprees. There defective individuals go on stabbing sprees. It is the same type of defective individuals, they are just using what is available to them.