Getty Images
What drives people to mass murder strangers? This is a question that many people in China ask themselves
“The Chinese people are so unhappy,” we read on social media following a new massacre in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: “There will be more and more copycat attacks. »
“This tragedy reflects the darkness that reigns within society,” wrote another.
These grim assessments, following a series of deadly incidents in China in 2024, have led to questions about what drives people to mass murder foreigners in “revenge against society.”
Such attacks are still rare given China's huge population and are not new, says David Schak, an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often in an attempt to attract attention.
This year has been particularly difficult.
From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked 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 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was particularly bloody.
On the 11th of the same month, a 62-year-old man rammed his car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people. Police said the driver was unhappy with his divorce settlement. He was sentenced to death this week.
A few days later, in the city of Changde, a man charged into a crowd of children and parents in front of an elementary school, injuring 30 of them. Authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.
The same week, a 21-year-old who was unable to graduate after failing his exams went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight people and injuring 17 others.
In September, a 37-year-old man sped through a Shanghai shopping mall, stabbing people as he passed. In June, four American instructors were attacked in a park by a 55-year-old man brandishing 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.
Reuters
Floral tributes outside a Wuxi college where a student killed people in a knife attack
The perpetrators largely targeted “random people” to show their “dissatisfaction with society,” says Professor Schak.
In a country with extensive surveillance capabilities, where women rarely hesitate to walk alone at night, these killings have sparked understandable unease.
So what caused so many mass attacks in China this year?
The slowdown of the Chinese economy
One of the main sources of pressure in China today is the weak economy. It's no secret that the country is struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a housing crisis that has swallowed up the savings of many families, sometimes to no avail.
On the outskirts of most major cities, there are entire housing developments whose construction has stopped because indebted developers cannot afford to complete them. In 2022, the BBC interviewed people camping in the concrete shells of their own unfinished apartments, with no running water, no electricity and no windows because they had nowhere to stay.
“The optimism certainly seems to have faded,” says George Magnus, a research associate at the China Center at the University of Oxford. “Let's use the word trapped, just for the moment. I think China is stuck in a kind of cycle of repression. Social repression and economic repression, on the one hand, and a kind of faltering economic development model, on the other. other.”
Studies appear to indicate a significant shift in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese about their personal prospects. A major joint analysis between the United States and China, which for years had recorded that inequalities in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, found in its most recent survey that people blame now an “unjust economic system”.
“The question is, who do people really blame?” » asks Mr. Magnus. “And the next step is that the system is unfair to me and I can't get out of it. I can't change my situation.”
A lack of options
In countries with healthy media, if you feel like you have been unfairly fired or that your house has been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local authorities, you can turn to journalists to get your story heard. But that's rarely an option in China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and is unlikely to publish stories that make any level of government look bad.
Then there are the courts – also run by and for the party – which are slow and inefficient. There has been a lot of talk on social media about the Zhuhai attacker's alleged motive: his failure to get what he believed to be a fair divorce settlement in court.
BBC/Xiqing Wang
An active labor market in Guangzhou city: youth unemployment has become one of China's biggest economic challenges
Experts say other avenues for expressing frustrations have also been reduced, if not shut down altogether.
Chinese people often express their grievances online, says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto who has conducted significant research on how the Chinese state responds to reprisals from its people.
“(They) go online and berate the government… just to express their anger. Or they can organize a small protest which the police often allow if it is small-scale,” she explains. “But that kind of dissent, little dissent, has been shut down over the last couple of years.”
Examples abound: increased censorship on the Internet, which blocks words or expressions deemed controversial or critical; cracking down on cheeky Halloween costumes that mock the administration; or when men in civilian clothes, who appeared to have been mobilized by local authorities, beat demonstrators in Henan province in front of banks who had frozen their accounts.
As for managing people's mental and emotional reactions to these stresses, this too has proven insufficient. Experts say counseling services in China are largely inadequate, leaving no way out for those who feel isolated, alone and depressed in modern Chinese society.
“Counseling can help build emotional resilience,” says Professor Silvia Kwok of the City University of Hong Kong, adding that China needs to increase its mental health services, particularly for at-risk groups who have experienced trauma or suffering from mental illness.
“People need to find different strategies or constructive ways to manage their emotions…making them less likely to react violently in times of intense emotional stress.”
Taken together, these factors suggest that the lid is tightening on Chinese society, creating a pressure cooker-like situation.
“There aren't many people around the massacres. But tensions nevertheless seem to be rising, and it doesn't seem like this will ease in the near future,” Mr. Magnus said.
Reuters
Police are monitoring any protest signs or costumes critical of the government as Halloween approaches in Shanghai.
What should worry the Communist Party are comments from the general public accusing those in power of being responsible.
Take for example this remark: “If the government truly acted fairly and justly, there would not be so much anger and grievances in Chinese society…the government's efforts have focused on creating a superficial sentiment of harmony. Although it may seem that he cares about disadvantaged people, their actions have instead caused the greatest injustices. »
While violent attacks have increased in many countries, Professor Ong said, the difference in China is that authorities have little experience in this area.
“I think the authorities are very alarmed because they have never seen this before, and their instinct is to crack down.”
When Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke about the Zhuhai attack, he seemed to acknowledge that pressure was mounting within society. He urged officials across the country to “learn hard lessons from the incident, address risks at the root, resolve conflicts and disputes as early as possible, and take proactive measures to prevent the extreme crime.”
But so far, lessons learned appear to have led to speeding up police response times through increased surveillance, rather than considering changes to how China is run.
“China is entering a new phase, a new phase that we haven't seen since the late 1970s,” says Professor Ong, referring to the time when the country began to open up again to world, triggering enormous changes.
“We must prepare for unexpected events, such as numerous random attacks and pockets of protest and the emergence of social instability.”
