After the country’s most deadly murder in a generation, researchers claim that China’s economic weariness is causing cultural tensions that increase people’s tendency to commit violent crimes out of anger or despair.
This year, Beijing’s renowned reputation for maintaining public order has been stifled by the country’s spate of violent attacks, which has prompted website reflection on the state of society.
On Monday, a man ploughed a car into masses at a sporting advanced in the southwestern area of Zhuhai, killing 35 and wounding 43, according to official statistics.
Since imposing stringent Covid restrictions in late 2022, China has struggled to rekindle financial development, maintain employment, and raise confidence.
Hanzhang Liu, an associate professor of political research at Pitzer College in the United States, said,” The recent flurry of violent strikes in China is a reflection of its worsening social and economic conditions.
The rising occurrence of these incidents suggests that more people in China are experiencing hardships and anguish than they have before, she told AFP.
In recent years, there have been more signs of economic problems in China, ranging from rising joblessness, anger over pricey cover and childcare, and youngsters cultures glorifying lower expectations and rejecting the rat race.
Violence is the “negative part of the same coin,” according to Lynette Ong, a distinguished professor of Chinese elections at the University of Toronto in Canada and senior fellow at the Asia Society.
” These are symptoms of a nation with a lot of pent-up problems”, Ong told AFP. ” Some individuals choose to give up,” they say. Some, if they’re unhappy, want to take revenge”.
The trouble was “very novel to China”, she said, adding that the state may be tipping” towards a distinct type of society, an ugly society”.
New challenges
Police said preliminary investigations showed the culprit of Monday’s frenzy was a 62-year-old person “dissatisfied” with a marriage settlement.
In other cases, a middle-aged man used a razor and weapons to kill at least 21 people in eastern Shandong province in February, and a 55-year-old person rammed a vehicle into a group in the northern city of Changsha in July, killing eight, following a house dispute.
In a Shanghai supermarket in September, a 44-year-old unemployed man fatally knifed a Japanese schoolboy in Shenzhen, and a 50-year-old man fatally wound five people in a knife attack that took place in Beijing last month.
While little media coverage and widespread online censorship have helped to understand the problem’s potential social roots, in some cases the motives remain secret or unidentified.
However, the attacks have revealed the limitations of a nationwide system of surveillance cameras and data-driven policing that ignore threats to public safety.
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”.
Minxin Pei, a professor at California’s Claremont McKenna College, told AFP that” the system is very good at watching known threats, but it does a poor job dealing with previously unknown or unidentified threats”.
According to Pei, who is also the author of” The Sentinel State,” a book on Chinese surveillance,” the man who killed so many people in Zhuhai most likely was n’t known as a threat to the police.”
Secrecy, strain
President Xi Jinping called on officials to prevent “extreme cases” after Monday’s attack, while Beijing’s foreign ministry repeated that the country is “one of the safest” in the world.
China’s official murder rate last year was 0.46 cases per 100, 000 people, compared to 5.7 in the United States.
Still, authorities swiftly extinguished commemorations of the Zhuhai incident, clearing public memorials and quashing online discussion.
According to analysts, the censorship was a reflexive state response to deter official embarrassment and copycat violence.
” The Chinese state’s default modus operandi is secrecy”, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
Liu, of Pitzer College, called the violence a” thorny challenge” to Beijing as it addresses the economic slowdown.
She told AFP that China typically strengthens public security and surveillance systems in response to social unrest.
This would only put more pressure on the government’s “unprecedented fiscal woes,” Liu said, adding that this only added pressure.
