“The Chinese people are so miserable,” read a social media post in the wake of yet another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: “There will only be more and more copycat attacks.”
“This tragedy reflects the darkness within society,” wrote another.
Such bleak assessments, following a spate of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to murder strangers en masse to “take revenge on society”.
Attacks like this are still rare given China’s huge population, and are not new, says David Schak, associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts at garnering attention.
This year has been especially distressing.
From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers.
In 2024, that number jumped to 19.
In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was especially bloody.
On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man ploughed a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the driver had been unhappy with his divorce settlement. He was sentenced to death this week.
Days later, in Changde city, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30 of them. The authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.
That same week, a 21-year-old who couldn’t graduate after failing his exams, went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight and injuring 17.
In September, a 37-year-old man raced through a Shanghai shopping centre, stabbing people as he went. In June, four American instructors were attacked at a park by a 55-year-old man wielding a knife. And there were two separate attacks on Japanese citizens, including one in which a 10-year-old boy was stabbed to death outside his school.
Floral tributes outside a college in Wuxi, where a student killed people in a mass stabbing
The perpetrators have largely targeted “random people” to show their “displeasure with society”, Prof Schak says.
In a country with vast surveillance capabilities, where women rarely hesitate to walk alone at night, these killings have sparked understandable unease.
So what has prompted so many mass attacks in China this year?
BBC
