Wave of mass stabbings in Chinese schools

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Six people were killed and one wounded in an attack at a kindergarten in southern China's Guangdong province on Monday, a spokeswoman for the city government said.

"The victims include one teacher, two parents and three students," she said.

She didn't offer details about the identities or ages of the victims, nor the weapon used in the attack, which took place in the city of Lianjiang.

Media were reporting that the attack was a stabbing, according to the Reuters news service.

"One suspect has been arrested," the spokeswoman said, adding that a police investigation was underway.

The suspect was a 25-year-old male surnamed Wu, local police said in a statement.

While guns are strictly controlled, China has been struggling with a spate of mass stabbings.

Violent crime has been on the rise as the economy has grown in recent decades and the gap between rich and poor has widened rapidly.

Fatal attacks targeting students and schools have occurred nationwide in recent years.

The attacks have forced authorities to step up security and prompted calls for more research into the root causes of such violent acts.

Last August, three people were killed and six others wounded in a knife attack at a kindergarten in southeast China's Jiangxi province.

In April 2021, two children were killed and 16 others wounded when a knife-wielding man entered a kindergarten in southern China.

In June of the previous year, 37 students and two adults were wounded by a knife-wielding attacker at a primary school in southern China.

And in November 2019, a man climbed a kindergarten wall in southwest Yunnan province and sprayed people with a corrosive liquid, wounding 51 of them, mostly students.

The same year, eight schoolchildren died and two others were wounded in a "school-related criminal case" in the central Hubei province, with a 40-year-old man arrested.

And in April 2018, a 28-year-old man killed nine college students and injured 12 others outside their school in the northern province of Shaanxi.

We still know little about what might have caused a man to enter a kindergarten in southern China and stab six people to death.

There are rumours swirling that it was revenge - that one of the dead adults had previously hit the attacker's child with his or her car. But that does not explain why six died, including three children and a teacher.

These sorts of crimes can feel senseless, and yet also depressingly common.

Go back to the 1990s and things like this were virtually unheard of in China.

Then, starting from around 2010, something began to change. That year, there was a sudden spate of knife attacks in which 17 children were killed.

This was something completely different. The children had been deliberately targeted to cause maximum pain and outrage.

China's then Premier, Wen Jiabao, visited the scene of one of the attacks and immediately called for more security at schools. But he also said the underlying "social tensions" that led to such crimes must be addressed.

It was an interesting use of words. It suggests that these apparently senseless crimes do have a logic to them.

Since then, China has witnessed a significant increase in such attacks, almost always by men, almost always designed to cause maximum outrage.

Experts say such men, and they are almost always men, fit a profile.

They have festering anger and resentment towards the society they live in, but do not feel part of.

By carrying out a sensational and violent crime, they bring notoriety to themselves, while inflicting pain and suffering on the society they hate.

But China may have some additional factors that have driven the recent rise in such crimes.

In the last two decades, China has gone through an extraordinary social and economic transition, from centrally planned socialist state to a hyper-competitive free-market economy, where some have become very wealthy and others have been left out of the bonanza.

Chinese people now joke that if you want a girlfriend, you need to have a nice car, and if you want a wife, you first need an apartment.

But this isn't really a joke.

Men with low social status, who earn low wages or are unemployed, have little prospect of finding a mate. This has been further exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, during which millions of Chinese spent months locked in their apartments, and a youth unemployment rate that hovers around 20%.

China now has a term for mass knife attacks and mass outrages. They are called "social revenge". Arguably, the conditions that led to the first social revenge attacks over a decade ago have only got worse.

I find it hard to believe that it's only males who are experiencing the pressures of a changing Chinese economy. There must be women who are not wealthy. I guess the women are looking to climb up out of the poverty via the men, and the men who have no hope of climbing up out of poverty and getting a mate stab the children, as an embodiment of everything they desire but will never achieve?