A year of mass attacks reveals anger and frustration

“The people of China are very sad,” said a post after the country’s mass killings earlier this year. The same user also warned: “There will only be more copycat attacks.”

“This tragedy shows the darkness of humanity,” wrote another.

Such negative reviews, following the mass killings in China in 2024, have raised questions about what drives people to kill so many strangers. “Revenge on society”.

Attacks like this aren’t happening because of China’s population growth, and they’re not new, says David Schak, an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But it seems to come in waves, often as a copycat trying to attract attention.

This year has been very stressful.

From 2019 to 2023, the police will record three to five cases every year, where the offenders hit pedestrians or strangers.

In 2024, this number increased to 19.

In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 died and 40 were injured and in 2024, 63 people were killed and 166 were injured. November was very bloody.

On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man detonated a car at people exercising outside a sports stadium in Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people. Police said the driver was not happy about breaking up his family. He was sentenced to death this week.

A few days later, in the city of Changde, a man walked into a group of children and parents outside a primary school, and 30 of the children were injured. Officials said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.

That same week, a 21-year-old who failed to complete his exams, went on a rampage at his school in the city of Wuxi, killing eight and injuring 17.

In September, a 37-year-old man ran through a shopping mall in Shanghai, stabbing people as they go. In June, four American counselors attacked a park with a 55-year-old man armed with a knife. And there were two separate attacks on Japanese citizens, including one in which a 10-year-old boy was killed and stabbed outside his school.

The perpetrators are targeting “random people” to express “anarchy against society,” says Prof Schak.

In a country with a lot of surveillance power, where women do not hesitate to walk alone at night, this killing has brought a sense of peace.

So what has caused so many people to attack in China this year?

What is causing problems in China right now is the economic slowdown. It is no secret that the country has been struggling with youth unemployment, huge debts and a housing crisis that has destroyed the lives of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it.

At the beginning of the big cities there are all the residential areas where the construction has stopped because the debt builders cannot afford to finish them. In 2022, the BBC asked the public camping in the concrete shells of their unfinished homeswithout water, electricity and windows because they had nowhere to live.

“Hope seems to have disappeared,” said George Magnus, a research fellow at Oxford University’s China Center. “Let’s use closed words, just for a moment. I think China is caught in a kind of oppression. Human oppression and economic oppression, on the one hand, is a kind of economic development that is in disarray.”

Surveys seem to show a major shift in attitudes, with a definite increase in skepticism among Chinese people about their prospects. A major joint US-China analysis, which for years has written that social inequality is often caused by a lack of power or ability, found in its most recent study that people were now there. criticizing the “unfair economic system”.

“The question is, who do people really blame?” Mr Magnus asks. “And the next step from that is that the system is unfair to me, and I can’t break it. I can’t change my circumstances.”

In countries with good media coverage, if you feel that you have been unfairly fired from your job or that your house has been demolished by fraudulent builders with the help of local authorities, you can go to the media to get your story heard. But this will not be the case in China, where the media is controlled by the Communist Party and cannot run stories that misrepresent any government.

Then there are the courts – which are also controlled by the party – which are slow and ineffective. Much has been made in the media here of the alleged motives of the Zhuhai attacker: that he did not achieve what he believed to be a fair divorce in court.

Experts say some outlets for depression have also been reduced or closed entirely.

Chinese people tend to express their grievances online, said Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, who has conducted research on China’s response to rejection of its own people.

“[They] they will go online and criticize the government… just to vent their anger. Or they can make small protests that the police usually allow to be small, “But that kind of disagreement, a little disagreement, has been shut down in the last few years.”

There are many examples of this: The proliferation of the Internet, which prevents words or expressions that are seen as controversial or controversial; disrupting Halloween costumes that make fun of the government; or as clothed men, who seem to have been assembled by the local authorities; beat protesters in Henan province outside of banks that have frozen their accounts.

When it comes to dealing with people’s emotional responses to stress, this has also been found to be low. Experts say China’s advice is inadequate, leaving no way out for those who feel isolated, alone and stressed in today’s Chinese society.

Professor Silvia Kwok from the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong said: “Counseling can help a person stay calm, and adds that China needs to increase mental health services, especially for people who are at risk of injury or who are suffering from mental illness.

“People need to find different ways or means to help them cope with their emotions…to make them less violent during times of great stress.”

Taken together, this shows that the cover is still growing in the Chinese population, which makes it difficult to cook.

“There aren’t many people walking around mass murdering. Yet the conflict seems to be escalating, and it doesn’t look like there’s any way to resolve it any time soon,” says Magnus.

What should worry the Communist Party is the comments from the common people that criticize those in power for this.

For example, consider these words: “If the government was really fair and just, there wouldn’t be so much anger and complaints in China.” . . poor people, their actions have caused great injustice.”

Although violence has been on the rise in many countries, according to Professor Ong, the difference in China is that the authorities have little knowledge of how to deal with it.

“I think the authorities are very scared because they have never seen it before, and their instinct is to break it.”

When Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about the attack in Zhuhai, he appeared to acknowledge the growing pressure among the public. He urged the authorities across the country to “learn from this incident, deal with the dangers that may arise, resolve conflicts and disputes early and take steps to prevent serious crimes”.

But, so far, the lessons learned seem to have resulted in the police being able to respond more quickly through greater surveillance, rather than considering any changes that China is running.

“China is moving into a new phase, a new phase that we haven’t seen since the late 70s,” says Prof Ong, referring to the time when the country began to open up to the world again, bringing about major changes.

“We have to deal with unexpected events, such as random attacks and pickpockets and the coming civil unrest.”