44 school kids stabbed in China in two days

[Doom]

44 school kids stabbed in China in two days

Beijing: Twenty-eight children were stabbed on Thursday by a 47-year-old man at a kindergarten in China's Jiangsu province, a day after 16 primary school students were attacked by a mentally-unstable man in Guangdong province.

An unemployed man, identified Xu Yuyuan, carried out the attack at 9.30 a.m. local time on Thursday in Zhongxin Kindergarten in Jiangsu's Taixing city, in which two teachers and a security guard were also injured, Xinhua quoted government officials as saying.

On Wednesday, a mentally-unstable 33-year-old man, named Chen Kangbing, had stabbed 16 students and a teacher at the Leicheng First Primary School in Guangdong province's Leizhou city.

Thursday's attacker Xu worked in an insurance company until he was fired in 2001. Since then, he has remained jobless, they said.

The children have been admitted in hospital and five of them are in a critical condition. Many of the injured children were four years old and studied in the same class.

Xu broke into the kindergarten classroom wielding a 20-cm-long knife and attacked the children and the two teachers. The security guard was injured when he tried to stop the man, police said.

Man stabs 28 children at kindergarten in China

Meanwhile, five of the injured students in the Guangdong attack were still critical on Thursday.

Authorities were assessing the mental state of Chen, an art teacher at Hongguan Primary School, in Leizhou city.

Chen had been on sick leave since February 2006, showed an inability to answer questions clearly, and was receiving a comprehensive psychiatric examination from the city public security bureau, Li Changwu, secretary of the city committee of the Communist Party of China, was quoted as saying on Thursday.

He had "sneaked into the campus" with teachers from different schools who had come to attend a class on teaching methods at the school, Chen Riwen, spokesman with the provincial education department said.

One of the students injured in the attack said he tumbled and hurt himself when he tried to escape. "I hid under the table in the classroom when he struck the knife. I didn't feel any pain at the time," Xiao Huang said.

He said his teacher blocked Chen and shouted "Run, Run!" to the students in the classroom.

Meanwhile, Xiao Wen, 12, was critically injured and was receiving a blood transfusion and oxygen for breathing, her father said, adding that she received cerebral injuries and suffered heavy blood loss.

Earlier, a mentally-unstable doctor who had stabbed eight schoolchildren to death in China's Fujian province was executed on Wednesday. He was put in front of the firing squad.

Zheng Minsheng, 41, who murdered the eight children March 23 at the gate of the Nanping Experimental Elementary School, had admitted in court that he "intentionally" killed them.

Zheng had asked the court to pay more attention to what prompted him to commit the crime, rather than to the crime itself. "I'm willing to shoulder the responsibility for what I did, but only for 30 percent. The other 70 percent should go to the woman who dumped me," he was quoted as saying.

The doctor said he just wanted an ordinary life like others, but failed. He felt his life was meaningless as he was not married, had been unsuccessful in relations with women, his family and in his career. He repeatedly told the judge that he had been turned down by a woman and suffered unfair treatment from her wealthy family, which prompted him to carry out the attack.

44 school kids stabbed in China in two days

 

[Doom]

Stunned China Looks Inward After School Attacks







By MICHAEL WINES
Published: April 30, 2010
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.
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The mother of a child who was wounded by a knife-wielding man in an attack on Thursday in Jiangsu Province.
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Associated Press

A student who was wounded Wednesday in an attack in Guangdong Province, where 15 students were stabbed.
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China Daily, via Reuters

Zheng Minsheng was sentenced to death in the March 23 killings of eight children in Fujian Province. The attack was the first of four recent ones.
Readers' Comments

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.


Stunned China Looks Inward After School Attacks - NYTimes.com

---------- Post added at 05:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:06 PM ----------

China 'sets up task force' after wave of school attacks

(AFP) – 5 hours ago

BEIJING — China has set up a special task force focused on beefing up school security, state media said Saturday, after three violent campus attacks against young children in as many days this week.

Education vice minister Hao Ping said emergency management was a "heavy task", as police patrols near school grounds were bolstered to protect the country's 270 million students, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Hao said 22 university and government experts would investigate "public incidents" in the education system and explore new ways to ensure "scientific emergency management" in the nation's schools.

His remarks came after a farmer attacked children with a hammer at a primary school in eastern China on Friday before setting himself on fire -- the latest in a wave of assaults that has left eight children dead and 50 people injured.

The farmer's rampage in Shandong province left five children and a teacher hurt but in stable condition, Xinhua said.

On Thursday, a jobless man apparently angry over a series of personal and professional setbacks slashed 29 children and three adults with a knife used to slaughter pigs in an attack at a kindergarten in the eastern city of Taixing.

Video footage posted online after the attack shows people said to be parents of the students marching on a street in protest and demanding to see their injured children.

The footage could not be independently verified by AFP and a spokesman for the Taixing government declined to comment on the apparent demonstration on Saturday.

On Wednesday, a 33-year-old teacher on sick leave due to mental problems injured 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack at a primary school in southern China's Guangdong province.

The assailants in both the Taixing and Guangdong attacks were arrested and all victims were said to be out of life-threatening condition.

Also on Wednesday, authorities in Fujian province in the southeast executed a former doctor for stabbing to death eight children and injuring five others on March 23 in a fit of rage after he split with his girlfriend.

The attacks underscore how China -- which has enjoyed lower violent crime rates than the West -- faces a growing public safety threat from disgruntled individuals amid rising mental illness rates and looser social controls.

The education ministry on Friday issued an "urgent" notice calling on schools to strengthen security, tighten restrictions on campus visitors and devise emergency plans.

"We must establish a safety first, prevention first concept," the ministry said in the notice, posted on its website.

Education minister Yuan Guiren said students should be given a "basic knowledge of self-defence", and security cameras installed at school entrances and other "important areas" to prevent further attacks, the Beijing News said.

AFP: China 'sets up task force' after wave of school attacks

 

[ARCHON]

what a sad incident. hope everyone will be alright.

 

[PlanetWarrior]

Sick b@stard. Hope they waste no time in placing him before the firing squad as well. That is what I like the most about China. Their quick and efficient justice system. Poor kids will be traumatised for the rest of their lives.

 

[aimarraul]

what kind of a loser would try to hurt the innocent kids,CPC better coordinate the social contradictions

 

[Doom]

There should be no leniency with the kid stabbers.

Also, china should look into why these types of incidents are happening regularly in its controlled society.

 

[below_freezing]

it is precisely that there is not enough control that these things happen.

think if mao or deng was still in charge these people would dare do something like this?

 

[shiningindia]

very sad incident. arrested man should be hanged. so that no one could do this again.

 

[SinoIndusFriendship]

There should be no leniency with the kid stabbers.

Also, china should look into why these types of incidents are happening regularly in its controlled society.

"....happening regularly...."???

Sorry to burst your bubble dude, but this ain't India.

In either case, attack the source of the problem not the symptom. In that I mean, when people become jobless for prolonged periods of time their minds start drifting, they become agitated, desperate, etc.

I've also noticed a rise in crime in USA and Europe from reading the news around the world. My suspicion is the same reason: BAD ECONOMY. So in that way I can understand the stuff happening in Canada, USA, Thailand, India, Russia, France, England, Germany, etc.

Best way is to stay calm, think things through carefully and talk to people. Talking to people really helps to relieve stress.

 

[SinoIndusFriendship]

it is precisely that there is not enough control that these things happen.

think if mao or deng was still in charge these people would dare do something like this?

Not everything can be solved by force. The problem is lack of a healthy outlet to vent his frustrations. But again the underlying issue is lack of resources-money. I don't mean to say money solves everything, no. He lost his job, felt like a loser for many years, and his frustration built up.

Let's fix the source of the problem, not the symptom.

 

[aimarraul]

"....happening regularly...."???

sad,but it's true,happening regularly this year.

 

[below_freezing]

Not everything can be solved by force. The problem is lack of a healthy outlet to vent his frustrations. But again the underlying issue is lack of resources-money. I don't mean to say money solves everything, no. He lost his job, felt like a loser for many years, and his frustration built up.

Let's fix the source of the problem, not the symptom.

i can understand his suffering, i thought my life was ending when i failed to get into 1st rate university in high school... after a few years everything looks so different.

unfortunately some people just can't get over it and resort to violence.

 

[no_name]

Zheng had asked the court to pay more attention to what prompted him to commit the crime, rather than to the crime itself. "I'm willing to shoulder the responsibility for what I did, but only for 30 percent. The other 70 percent should go to the woman who dumped me," he was quoted as saying.

The doctor said he just wanted an ordinary life like others, but failed. He felt his life was meaningless as he was not married, had been unsuccessful in relations with women, his family and in his career. He repeatedly told the judge that he had been turned down by a woman and suffered unfair treatment from her wealthy family, which prompted him to carry out the attack.

This is F****** bullshit. The man is a coward. We all have problems and we deal with them.

 

[grey boy 2]

There should be no leniency with the kid stabbers.

Also, china should look into why these types of incidents are happening regularly in its controlled society.

Yes, so true, we should learn from some so-called open society of

how to deal with kid stabbers, and also kid molesters, raping etc,

well said buddy.

 

[below_freezing]

we shouldn't learn from the US, which imprisons more people than any other nation on earth and aims its repressive state machine against its most vulnerable minorities.

instead, we should learn from britain and educate people about obeying police and authority. ignorance and poverty are the main causes of crime.