SHANGHAI — A former community doctor allegedly stabbed to death eight children and injured five others at a primary school in east China’s Fujian province, the authorities said, as China grapples with a rise in high-profile criminal violence in i
ts cities.
Police in Nanping city said they arrested Zheng Minsheng, 41 years old, at the scene of the attack, which occurred as students were arriving to start school in the morning.
A spokesman for the city government said the cause of the attack remained under investigation. State media said Mr. Zheng had a history of mental illness.
Such episodes remain relatively rare in China. But a series of bloody multiple killings in recent years has highlighted shortcomings in policing as well as mounting social frictions that experts say are spurring crime. Knives are often the weapon of choice, in part because China sharply limits its citizens’ access to firearms. Regular police also do not routinely carry guns.
“The government hasn’t paid enough attention” to the problem of violent crime, said Pi Yijun, a criminology professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. He said that crime rates are edging up, driven by unemployment and other economic problems and the widening gap between rich and poor. Mr. Pi said that in many cases, attackers “think they were unfairly treated by society.”
In 2008, a 28-year-old man stabbed to death six Shanghai policemen in a police station in a case that ended up winning the convicted killer a fair measure of public sympathy after local media reported the man, Yang Jia, had been arrested and beaten by Shanghai police in 2007 for riding an unlicensed bicycle. His attempt to file a lawsuit against the police was thwarted. Mr. Yang was executed in 2008.
After Tuesday’s attack on the school, a number of online comments about the incident focused on social pressures presumed to be behind the violence. “Another guy who is getting revenge on society,” wrote one person on a bulletin board. “What a society that makes people so crazy,” wrote another.
Attacks succeed even in the face of tightened security. An unemployed Chinese man killed the brother-in-law of a U.S. Olympic volleyball coach during the first weekend of the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, amid a massive security clampdown in the capital. That man committed suicide.
