China has seen a series of indiscriminate lone wolf ‘revenge against society’ attacks targeting members of the public
On November 16, eight people were killed and 17 injured in a stabbing rampage at a vocational school in Wuxi. Police said the 21-year-old perpetrator had failed his exams and was unhappy with his internship pay. There has been a notable uptick in ‘social revenge’ attacks this year, in which individuals indiscriminately target strangers in public places in lone wolf attacks seen as expressing anger against society as a whole.
What next
Subsidiary Impacts
- High-profile crimes damage public support for the Communist Party, which frequently celebrates China’s low crime rate.
- A sense of insecurity will strengthen public support for increased surveillance by the authorities.
- A growing need to combat crime is one factor that will make China ramp up security and surveillance measures as its economy slows.
Analysis
The stabbings in Wuxi were only the latest of a string of high-profile attacks:
- On November 11, a 62-year-old man deliberately drove his car into a crowd at a sports centre in Zhuhai, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Police said he had been unhappy about the split of assets after a divorce.
- On September 30, three were killed and 15 injured when a 37-year-old man went on a stabbing rampage at a Walmart in Shanghai to “vent his anger due to a personal economic dispute”, police said.
Xenophobia is seen as playing a role in several attacks that have targeted foreigners:
- A ten-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death at his school in Shenzhen in September (see CHINA: People-to-people exchanges will diminish – September 23, 2024).
- In June, four college teachers from the United States were stabbed in Jilin.
- In a separate attack the same month, a Japanese mother and her son were attacked in Suzhou in a knife attack on a school bus carrying Japanese children. A Chinese woman who intervened was killed.
Whether these attacks constitute a trend, a random cluster or an instance of copycat behaviour is unclear. Although the recent attacks have been particularly bloody, similar random acts of violence, often targeting children, have occurred frequently enough over the years that the ‘social revenge’ pattern has become a familiar one.
Questionable crime claims
Violent crime is extremely rare in China, at least on paper. Data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) show China’s homicide rate at 0.50 per 100,000 people (2020), lower than Norway (0.55 in 2022), the Netherlands (0.81 in 2022) and Sweden (1.1 in 2022) and far lower than the United States (6.38 in 2022).
Common explanations include:
- strict controls on guns and knives;
- ubiquitous urban surveillance camera networks and facial recognition systems;
- well-resourced and heavy-handed policing; and
- severe punishments, including frequent use of the death penalty.
The accuracy of Chinese crime statistics has been widely questioned. Controlling crime is one metric by which officials’ performance is evaluated, so there is an incentive to underreport or misreport crime of all kinds. For instance, research by Borge Bakken of Australia National University found that 97.5% of all crimes in Guangzhou were not included in official statistics.
Regardless, there has been a strong perception among Chinese citizens — encouraged by the media — that the country’s cities are unusually safe compared to those in foreign countries, especially the United States. The recent spate of violent attacks has undermined the public’s sense of safety.
Political security
Media coverage and social media discussion of violent crime are carefully controlled. Competence in protecting citizens from crime is one way the Communist Party justifies its right to rule and wins public acceptance for policies that serve the dual purpose of ensuring political security (see CHINA: Cybersurveillance will grow – September 9, 2024).
For example, in a survey by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last year:
- 77.4% of respondents said they were comfortable with the level of video surveillance in their community or wanted even more; and
- 47.6% said they would be comfortable with the government collecting and storing their DNA information or that of family members.
Other research has found that greater use of facial recognition enhances people’s sense of security without leading to increased privacy concerns.
Social malaise
In China as elsewhere, high-profile crimes typically trigger discussions about social issues. They are assumed to have social causes beyond the obvious mental instability of the individual perpetrators and are interpreted as symptoms of deeper social malaise.
Social revenge crimes in China have been attributed to the following factors.
The weakening of China’s economy, economic inequality and intense competition in education and the job market are seen as engendering anxiety, hopelessness, frustration and bitterness, putting individuals under chronic psychological pressure that can eventually explode in violent outbursts (see CHINA: Slower growth builds case for fiscal stimulus – October 25, 2024).
Inadequate understanding of mental health issues and poorly resourced mental health support may be blamed for allowing the perpetrator’s psychological state to deteriorate to a critical level. (In fact, statistics do not indicate that mental health problems are unusually severe in China by international comparison, and provision of mental health services has expanded dramatically over the past decade.)
Promotion of xenophobic nationalism by the education and propaganda systems may be implicated in attacks on foreigners, especially Japanese people (see JAPAN/CHINA: Bilateral relations will remain tense – September 27, 2024).
The absence of pressure valves for people to express their grievances means those cannot be channelled into open discourse and instead manifest themselves in other ways, sometimes violent.
The weight of these factors in larger-scale social revenge attacks may never be clear. However, the issues themselves are real and serious. Of the four, only the provision of mental health support shows a positive trend. Tightened social control and xenophobic propaganda have intensified in recent years and the deterioration of the economy since 2020 is evident in a raft of data.
Downward spiral
The weakening of the economy has implications for law and order that go far beyond social revenge attacks to encompass crime of many kinds, from cybercrime and fraud to narcotics and human trafficking (see CHINA/US: Drug control will depend on ties – July 17, 2024).
A robust body of research by criminologists and sociologists links crime with socioeconomic factors such as poverty, unemployment and inequality. At the same time, economists have demonstrated that crime can have a negative effect on economic growth by imposing costs on businesses, deterring investment and decreasing productivity.
This is one dimension of the ‘middle-income trap’ into which many developing economies have fallen, growing fast at first but then stagnating before ever joining the ranks of the developed countries.
Even if China’s unusually sophisticated policing spares the country from a downward spiral, security may well consume a greater share of government and private-sector resources as crime and social control both intensify to contain rising public discontent.
