Stunned China Looks Inward After School Attacks

Stunned China Looks Inward After School Attacks
By MICHAEL WINES
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/world/asia/01china.html?th&emc=th


BEIJING — In the wake of a fourth horrific attack on Chinese schoolchildren — this time by a crazed man who on Friday beat five toddlers with a hammer, then set himself on fire with two other children in his arms — this shocked and bruised nation was of two distinctly different minds.

On the Internet and in newspapers, people agonized over whether their tightly regimented society, a boiling caldron of change with no pressure valve to let off steam, was blowing its lid.

In the halls of government, however, the emphasis was on preventing the steam from escaping at all.

After the first attack, in which a man stabbed and killed eight children outside an elementary school in Fujian Province on March 23, the Internet and government media bubbled with outrage, and the state-run Xinhua news service issued a lengthy study of the loner who committed the crime.

But on Friday, after three consecutive days of spontaneous and inexplicable assaults on children as young as 3, the media went silent. News of the latest attack, at the Shangzhuang Primary School in Shandong Province, vanished from the headlines on major Internet portals, replaced by an announcement that the government had assembled a team of 22 experts to help the education system set things right.

Posts on social networking sites indicated the change in tone came from the Communist Party’s central propaganda department, which directs and censors coverage of major news events.

If it was a classic response, born of Leninist dogma that dictates that bad news be buried and the state’s heroism trumpeted, it was still understandable after a week of what were apparently copycat crimes.

But it brought little comfort to average citizens, who still wondered what in their society could generate such madness. Online, many of them focused on problems — the growing rich-poor gap or the helplessness of average people in the face of power — that are a backdrop to everyday life.

In Taixing, the city in Jiangsu Province where a knife-wielding man stabbed 28 kindergarten students and three adults on Thursday, critically wounding at least five children, protesting parents took to the streets chanting, “We want the truth! We want our babies back!”

“The three killers wanted to get revenge on society,” one person, Zhang Han, wrote in an Internet chat posting. “They considered themselves as ‘underprivileged,’ and they chose an even more vulnerable group, children, to get revenge. Doubtless their own psychological problems played an indispensable role. But social inequality is obviously the catalyst.”

There likely is no single explanation for the assaults in Fujian, Shandong, Jiangsu and, on Wednesday, in Guangdong Province, where a 33-year-old former teacher stabbed 15 fourth-and fifth-graders. (In China, where access to guns is tightly controlled, knives are one weapon of choice in violent crimes.) Many Chinese might correctly note that their situation is hardly unique; the United States and other nations have also endured violent attacks on students.

Yet some aspects of the assaults — the alacrity with which they were copied by new assailants, to cite one example — raised questions among some Chinese about whether something else was at work here. Curiously, the four attacks in March and April mirror a series of assaults in August and September 2004, in which students in four other schools and a day care center were attacked by knife-wielding men who stabbed dozens of children.

One theme echoed in some Internet postings was the feeling by many Chinese citizens that they had little power in the face of authority, and few ways to right wrongs. One posting compared the attacks to a notorious rampage in July 2008 by a man who said he felt he had been wronged by the police. In a single attack in Shanghai, the man, Yang Jia, stabbed six police officers to death — and he became a national hero by the time he was executed that November.

One person who posted in a chat room pointed out that after the attack in March, a student wrote a letter to the assailant, saying, “If you’ve got hatred, please go to kill the corrupted official.”

“Isn’t it shocking to hear such assertions come from a child?” the poster wrote. “But in fact, this is a collective perception shared by the entire society. That’s why Yang Jia was hailed as a hero after killing innocent police.”

Stan Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who leads the university’s East Asian Studies Center, noted that the Cultural Revolution under Mao was so violent in part because it unleashed the bottled rage of a society that had suffered famine, impoverishment and brutal rule — and had no outlet for its grief.

Mao’s days are a distant memory now, and citizen protests, muckraking journalism and open discussion of social problems are accepted parts of Chinese life. But Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard University sociologist whose new book, “Myth of the Social Volcano,” parses the frustrations of average Chinese, said in an interview that a caldron of discontent still bubbled.

That, he argued, is mostly because average citizens still feel they have no steam valve, and the government is still concerned about keeping the lid on.

“The system still very much tries to pretend everything is going fine,” he said, “and it still hushes things up when there are disturbances.”

Zhang Jing and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 30, 2010

An earlier version of this article misidentified the province where Leizhou is located. It is in Guangdong Province, not Shandong. An earlier version of this article also misstated the percentage of mentally ill people thought not to have received professional help in China. The correct figure is 91 percent, not 98 percent.