Yesterday a man wielding a knife killed three children at a kindergarten in eastern China's Shandong province, the latest in a string of attacks that has shocked parents and has forced government leaders to focus on the underlying causes of the violence. Police have detained a 26-year-old man, Fang Jiantang, who admitted to killing the children, state-run Xinhua news agency said Wednesday. Xinhua described the man as self-employed. There was no immediate word on what motivated his murderous rampage.
The three children died at the school, and three other children, along with four teachers, were taken to a hospital, Xinhua said. The attack occurred in Zibo, a manufacturing city with a population of more than four million. The assault took place Tuesday afternoon, but Xinhua didn't issue a report until a day later.
Reached for comment, officials at the education bureau of the Boshan district of Zibo said Communist Party officials in Beijing had ordered them not to release details of the attack. An employee at the state-run Zibo Daily said the paper was told not to run the story in Wednesday's edition.
The incident is the first major school attack in China since May, when a man in Shaanxi province killed seven schoolchildren and two adults with a meat clever. Since March, more than 20 children and adults have been killed in at least seven attacks across China.
There were a total 7 kindergarten and primary school massacres this year in China:
March:
Nan Ping City, Fujian Province 8 primary school students have been killed.
April:
Guangxi Province, He Pu City, one 8 year old child and one woman were killed.
Shan Dong Province, Wei Fang city, 5 students were injured, the killer commited suicide by setting himself on fire.
Guangxi Province, Lei Zhou city, 16 children were injured.
Jiang Shu Province, Tai Xing City, 31 kindergarten children were injured
May:
Shan Xi Province, Han Zhong City, 9 have been killed in a local kindergarten, 11 injured.
The last one was on August 3rd , 2010, in Shan Dong Province, Zibo City. According to government officials, 4 killed, 13 injured. (Read full story HERE).
The poor can not go against the strong, so they go for the weak. We will never know the motivation of this killing, since it will be dealt like the previous killers- swiftly, and without an open trial. Most of the internet posting regarding the story had already been deleted.
May 2010.Shanxi Province, Nanzhen City , 7 children and 2 adults killed, 13 children injured.
Same story with an English audio
April 28,2010
Guang Dong Province Zhen Jiang City
April 29 2010
In this case, thousands of people went to the streets.
Many people in China believe that these are acts of the desperate “Plea People”. The "Plea People" is a nickname in China for grieved Chinese who are exhausted and have failed every procedure to seek justice. Many of these so called “Plea people” have been jailed or kidnapped by local government officials of their home town, and some of them were put into mental "correction facilities".
Most Chinese believed these killing are a form anti government protests. Since the killers have been executed swiftly without public trial and media coverage, we will never know their true motivation. But sometimes perceptions are more important than reality, and even the motives of the killers were different, what is important is what the people think is their motive.
Strict censorship has been implemented to prevent any news coverage. Every school in major china city have been armed and guarded by full time body guards and police.
In China’s Shark Loan Ponzi Finance- As Ponzi Schemes Collapse the Chinese Government Fears Civil Unrest we mentioned the Huang Qiao massacre.
The killer, Mr Xu Yu Yuan, is from Huang Qiao town, and participated in the Huang Qiao "Mark organization", (shark loan ponzi scheme). According to reports from China, many believe that the fact that he lost all of his money in the ponzi scheme is part of his motivation .
Evan Osnos, from the New Yorker reported wrote the following after the May massacre:
The fifth attack on a Chinese school since March adds to a string of grisly headlines. In China, they have prompted a tense discussion of the nation’s underdeveloped mental-health system, but also the range of social pressures that push marginal people into acts of extraordinary violence. (As I’ve mentioned before, Chinese authorities have moved to suppress reporting of these attacks.) The latest crime, in which a well-off village merchant used a meat cleaver to kill seven school children, their teacher, and her mother before taking his own life, appears to have been related to a business dispute over property; but that doesn’t mean it is unrelated to the other factors as well.
I’m on a reporting trip today, but here are some stories worth reading on the subject:
• The Wall Street Journal has a good on-scene report from Shai Oster who says, “Wednesday’s killing spree is likely to further erode faith in the government’s ability to stem the spate of apparent copycat crimes terrorizing schools despite beefed-up security. The Communist Party has built its reputation in part on maintaining relative stability and a low crime rate in a country that over the past century has struggled with long bouts of anarchy and lawlessness.”
• Edward Wong in the Times points out the political context: “The senseless suffering of children has become something of an Achilles’ heel for President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. They have presided over an extraordinary economic expansion and a rapid rise in China’s global influence. But they have not been able to keep tainted infant formula off grocery store shelves or to account for why so many public school buildings collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, killing more than 5,000 children.”
• Like much of the Chinese press, Xinhua is focussing less on the details of the attack than on the efforts to prevent another. “China Strengthens Security on Campuses” describes special security guards popping up in Foshan. In some cases, papers are discussing what this Global Times piece calls “the pent-up feeling” behind the attacks, but the discussion is handled gingerly.
After the May massacre there was an essay written by a popular Chinese blogger named Han Han. The essay has since been deleted from his blog, but is available in other places around the internet. You can read the original piece HERE
The following is a translation of the post, that was done by C. Custer:
Another stabbing incident in a Taixing kindergarten left thirty-two people injured and the number of dead still unclear [as of when Han Han wrote the post, there appear to be no deaths]. This incident came so close to the Nanping kindergarten stabbing attack that I first thought they were the same kindergarten.
Among recent incidents of murderous insanity, nearly all the perpetrators have chosen to attack kindergartens or primary schools. It seems that in the hearts of many who want to exact revenge on society, going to kindergartens and primary schools and killing people has become a kind of fashion because in the process of the murder one encounters the least resistance so you can kill more people. Creating great panic among the people is the best means of taking revenge on society. Aside from Yang Jia, nearly all killers choose to begin by killing the weak. If they feel there’s no way out in society, then killing those even weaker than themselves becomes their only way out. I recommend that all the police guarding the doors of local officials nationwide be transferred to guard kindergartens. A government that can’t even protect children doesn’t need so many people protecting it.
One of the great causes of these murders is social injustice and unfairness. Yes, “fairness and justice must be more brilliant than the sun” [This is something Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said earlier this year]. But the sun doesn’t come out every day. Doesn’t it seem as though there are a bit too many overcast days and nights? So saying that fairness and justice must be more brilliant than the sun isn’t impressive, only when the sun is hanging over our heads every minute of every day will it be impressive.
After the Taizhou kindergarten murder incident, the media was controlled. These children were born at the wrong time [i.e., unlucky] and they died at an even worse time. In this jubilant atmosphere [of the opening of the Shanghai Expo], this incident is just noise to the relevant government departments. All we know is that according to the government, 32 people were injured and no one died, but on the streets there are rumors that many children were killed. So who should I believe? If the government is telling the truth, then why are they not letting parents see their children? They’ve also blocked off the hospital and shut off the news, and there are no photographs or video of children. Moreover, a murderer chops up thirty two people with a knife and no one dies? Was he really committing murder or performing surgery? [On the other hand,] if I want to believe what people are saying, I must remember that the word on the street is usually exaggerated, and with no evidence at all, there’s really no way to trust it. So I searched [the web] for Taizhou and unexpectedly came across this article from April 30 [i.e., after the killings]: “The Three Happinesses Come to Taizhou”.
I was very astonished. The Taizhou government has successfully sealed information, closed the hospital, controlled the media, forbidden visitors, and diverted public attention, but now they have successfully taken the people’s anger at the killer and directed it at themselves, and for what? It’s not that they have some other motive. Aside from wanting to cooperate with singing the Shanghai Expo’s “harmonious song”, this is just inertia; it’s the government dealing with a situation according to their habits. It’s their usual process: eat, drink and be merry all night until something happens, then hide, isolate, remove the media, make prohibitions, send press releases, make compensations, cremate the bodies — then go back to eating and drinking. Their way of dealing with things isn’t much more noble than a murderer’s. No wonder I saw online a kindergarten hanging a banner: “Injustice has a cause, debt has an owner, out the door and to the left is the government building.”
Five school killings in a month, and two within just a week (4/29 Taizhou, 4/30 Weifang). I don’t want to delve into the social reasons for the killing, I just want to tell everyone here that a man rushing into a kindergarten and stabbing children can’t even make the news. To the thirty-two kids whose ages would only reach a hundred if you added them all up, you’ve been stabbed, but you can’t even get into a newspaper, because a few hundred kilometers away there is a grand meeting with millions of fireworks. At the same time, your hometown of Taizhou is enjoying the “three happinesses”: national tourism days, economic talks, and a ceremony to celebrate overseas Chinese starting businesses.
Perhaps in the eyes of those old men, you children are just spoiling their fun.
Wretched children, it is you who are poisoned by milk powder, harmed by vaccines, crushed by earthquakes, and burnt in fires. Even if there’s a problem with rules in the adult world, you are the ones adults stab in retaliation. I truly hope it is as the Taizhou government says, and you’re all just injured and no one has died. We elders have failed in our duties. I hope that when you grow up, you will not only protect your own children but build a society that protects everyone’s children.
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