THE economic malaise is fuelling social tensions that make people more likely to commit violent crime out of anger or desperation, analysts say, after the country witnessed its deadliest massacre in a decade.
The country has experienced a spate of violent attacks this year, challenging Beijing’s proud reputation for public order and prompting online soul-searching about the state of society.
On Monday, a man ploughed a car into crowds at a sports complex in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing 35 and wounding 43, according to official figures.
It followed a string of similar crimes as China struggles to revive economic growth, keep people employed and boost confidence since it ended rigid Covid curbs in late 2022.
“The recent spate of violent attacks in China is a reflection of its worsening social and macroeconomic conditions,” said Hanzhang Liu, an assistant professor of political studies at Pitzer College in the United States.
“Although these incidents are sporadic in nature, the increasing frequency at which they happen does suggest that more people in China are suffering from hardships and desperation that they have not previously experienced,” she said.
Signs of economic distress have multiplied in China in recent years, from capital flight and emigration to rising joblessness, anger at expensive housing and childcare, and youth cultures glorifying low expectations and rejecting the rat race.
Lynette Ong, distinguished professor of Chinese politics at Canada’s University of Toronto and senior fellow at the Asia Society, said violent attacks were the “negative side of the same coin”.
“These are symptoms of a society with a lot of pent-up grievances,” Ong said. “Some people resort to giving up. Others, if they’re angry, want to take revenge.”
The problem was “very new to China”, she said, adding that the country may be tipping “towards a different type of society, an uglier society”.
Police said initial enquiries showed the perpetrator of Monday’s rampage was a 62-year-old man “dissatisfied” with a divorce settlement.
In other cases, a middle-aged man used a knife and firearm to kill at least 21 people in eastern Shandong province in February, and a 55-year-old man rammed a car into a crowd in the central city of Changsha in July, killing eight, following a property dispute.
A 50-year-old man wounded five in a knife attack at a school in Beijing last month; a 37-year-old man fatally stabbed three and injured 15 in a Shanghai supermarket in September; and a 44-year-old unemployed man fatally knifed a Japanese schoolboy in Shenzhen the same month.
In some cases, the motives remain unclear or undisclosed, while scant media coverage and widespread censorship have hampered understanding of the problem’s potential social roots.
But the attacks have revealed the limits of a nationwide system of surveillance cameras and data-driven policing that roots out public security threats.
Suzanne Scoggins, an associate professor of political science at Clark University in the United States, said the recent attacks showed that “there is no such thing as an all-seeing, all-knowing police state”. — AFP
