The Class(room) War: Assaults on China’s Schoolchildren

Wu huanming had problems. The problems he faced weren’t exceptional — the 48-year-old landlord suffered from diabetes and an inflamed prostate, a tenant owed him money — but his response certainly was. On May 12, Wu went to a private kindergarten housed in a ramshackle building he owned. The school’s rent was overdue, and Wu believed the principal had caused his medical problems by cursing him with a dead snake. Armed with a cleaver, he hacked 50-year-old principal Wu Hongyin to death, along with her 80-year-old mother and seven children. He then went home and killed himself.

That single attack in China’s central Shaanxi province would be enough to shake the nation. But it is only one of a series of assaults, mostly on schoolchildren, over the past two months. The violence has prompted questions about the state of China’s mental-health care, highlighted shortcomings in the country’s legal system and left the government struggling to stop the bloodshed. For a leadership that has emphasized the creation of a harmonious society, the repeated assaults have painfully exposed how distant that ideal remains.

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The carnage has left at least 18 dead and dozens injured. The first and one of the deadliest attacks came on March 23, when a 42-year-old former physician used a knife to kill eight students and wound five others outside the Nanping Experimental School in southeastern Fujian province. The assailant, Zheng Minsheng, said during his speedy trial that he was enraged by a failed romance. Domestic media reports suggested he had a history of mental illness. Zheng was executed on April 28 — the same day that 33-year-old Chen Kangbing stabbed 16 students and a teacher at a school in Guangdong province in southeast China. Chen had been a teacher at another school but went on disability leave in 2006 for mental-health problems, according to state media. That was followed by an April 29 attack in Jiangsu province and another on April 30 in Shandong in eastern China. On May 16, a man in Foshan, Guangdong’s third largest city, killed a woman and injured five with a meat cleaver before throwing himself from a building.

There are no direct links between the attacks, but there are similarities. With the exception of the Foshan attacker, who was in his 20s, the assailants have all been middle-aged men. They have acted alone, although it’s likely some of the attacks were copycat killings. “The problems have been there for many years, but the concurrence of similar attacks in a short period of time, that was largely triggered by media reporting,” says Ding Xueliang, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Chinese media have been ordered to downplay coverage of the attacks, but the news has still received widespread attention online. Besides, the idea of mass violence directed at schools is hardly new. China experienced a similar outbreak of attacks in 2004 that left 14 dead.

(Read “China’s Soul Searching As School Killings Continue.”)

Deficiencies in mental-health care likely contributed to the recent bloodshed. At least three attackers had known problems. “What they all have in common is a lack of friends and family connections,” says Pi Yijun, a criminal-psychology professor at the China University of Political Science and Law, “and they have no psychological support when they need it.”

That’s the case for much of the country. A study of four Chinese provinces published in the Lancet last June found that among individuals with a diagnosable mental illness, just 5% had seen a mental-health professional. “The reasons for this are not just access to care,” says the study’s lead author Michael Phillips, director of the Suicide Research and Prevention Center at the Shanghai Mental Health Center and a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine. “Another is that many people don’t recognize they have a mental-health illness and others are unwilling to go because of the stigma.” Yang Jiaqin, who stabbed seven people outside a school in the southern Guangxi region on April 12, killing a second-grader and an 81-year-old woman, had been treated for mental illness twice. His family had decided he needed more care, but he went on his rampage a day before he was scheduled to visit a hospital for treatment.

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The sweeping social changes that China has undergone over the past 30 years have left many people struggling to cope. Millions have migrated far from their homes in search of work. A rising wealth gap has helped stoke animosity between rich and poor. In this particularly Chinese milieu, pent-up frustrations are exacerbated by the lack of opportunity for conflict resolution. Disgruntled parties have little legal recourse when they clash with local officials. Some of the assailants spoke of personal grievances that may have prompted their bloody frenzies. On April 30, Wang Yonglai, a 45-year-old farmer, attacked five schoolchildren with a hammer and then set himself ablaze. He was believed to have been infuriated by a dispute with local officials. According to state-run news service Xinhua, he was told that a house he built for his son with his life savings would have to be demolished because it was illegally constructed on farmland.

How can pressure be reduced on fragile individuals? China’s petition system, which allows citizens who feel they are being mistreated by local officials to file a complaint with higher authorities, is inefficient. One study found that just two out of every 1,000 petitions achieve any sort of results. To stem the flood of violence, says Ma Ai, a sociology professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, the government should improve the legal system. “In the long run, it boils down to building a society where everyone is treated justly by law,” says Ma.

(Read “China’s Alarming Spate of School Knifings.”)

In the short run, China needs to improve school safety. Because private firearms are banned in China, attackers are limited to using simpler weapons. A decade ago, mass poisonings were common. In 2002, 49 people died in one intentional poisoning outside the city of Nanjing. But as the government began to crack down on the sale of toxic pesticides, individuals bent on mayhem turned to knives. And that helps explain why the recent attacks were aimed at children or women — they are soft targets, upon which an assailant with a knife can inflict great harm. “It’s the most effective way to achieve popular shock,” says Ding.

China’s government says it is considering every angle to stop the violence. Official teams have been sent to monitor safety preparations and security at schools beefed up. In Beijing alone, 2,000 additional guards have been posted at the capital’s kindergartens and elementary schools since March, according to the Beijing News. Schools have even been buying large steel pitchforks, specifically designed to keep an attacker at bay, from online auction sites.

But the latest attack shows just how much more China’s schools have to do. In Shaanxi on May 1, the provincial education bureau told schools to “strictly enforce access controls, register all visitors, prevent all uninvited personnel from entering school campuses and reinforce management at school gates during school hours.” But there was no one at the gates to stop Wu Huanming, when, less than two weeks later, he decided to unleash his private hell on a kindergarten there.

— with reporting by Chengcheng Jiang and Jessie Jiang / Beijing

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