A year of mass attacks reveals anger and frustration

“Chinese people are so miserable,” read a social media post following another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: “There will only be more and more copycat attacks.”

“This tragedy reflects the darkness within society,” wrote another.

Such bleak assessments, following a series of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to mass murder strangers in “take revenge on society”.

Attacks like this are still rare given China’s huge population and are not new, says David Schak, an associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts to get attention.

This year has been especially distressing.

From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year in which perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers.

In 2024, that number jumped to 19.

In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 dead and 166 injured. November was especially bloody.

On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man drove a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people. Police said the driver was unhappy with their divorce settlement. He was sentenced to death this week.

Days later, in the city of Changde, a man ran over a crowd of children and parents in front of an elementary school, injuring 30 of them. Authorities said he was angry about financial losses and family problems.

That same week, a 21-year-old who failed to graduate after failing his exams, stabbed his campus in the city of Wuxi, killing eight and wounding 17.

In September, a 37-year-old man ran through a Shanghai shopping mall. stabbing people while walking. In June, four American instructors were attacked in a park by a 55-year-old man wielding a knife. And there were two separate attacks on Japanese citizens, including one in which a 10-year-old boy was stabbed to death outside his school.

The perpetrators mainly targeted “random people” to show their “discontent with society,” says Professor Schak.

In a country with vast surveillance capabilities, where women rarely hesitate to walk alone at night, these murders have caused understandable unrest.

So what has caused so many massive attacks in China this year?

A major source of pressure in China right now is the sluggish economy. It’s no secret that the country has been struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a housing crisis that has consumed the life savings of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it.

On the outskirts of most big cities there are entire housing estates where construction has stopped because debt-ridden developers cannot afford to complete them. In 2022, the BBC interviewed people camping in the concrete structures of their own unfinished apartmentswithout running water, electricity and windows because they had no other place to stay.

“Optimism certainly seems to have faded,” says George Magnus, a research associate at the University of Oxford’s China Centre. “Let’s use the word trapped, just for the moment. I think China has been trapped in a kind of cycle of repression. Social repression and economic repression, on the one hand, and a kind of faltering economic development model, on the other.”

Studies appear to point to a significant shift in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese about their personal prospects. A major joint analysis between the United States and China, which for years had recorded them saying that inequality in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, found in its most recent survey that people now blaming an “unfair economic system”.

“The question is who do people really blame?” Mr. Magnus asks. “And the next step is that the system is unfair to me and I can’t get over it. I can’t change my circumstances.”

In countries with healthy media, if you feel that you have been unfairly fired from your job or that your house has been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local officials, you can turn to journalists to get your story heard. But that is rarely an option in China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and is unlikely to publish articles that reflect poorly on any level of government.

Then there are the courts – also administered by and for the party – which are slow and inefficient. There was much talk on social media about the Zhuhai attacker’s alleged motive: that he failed to achieve what he believed was a fair divorce settlement in court.

Experts say other outlets to vent frustrations have also been reduced or closed entirely.

Chinese people often voice their grievances online, says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, who has conducted significant research on how the Chinese state responds to its people’s rejection.

“(They) will go online and berate the government… just to vent their anger. Or they can organize a small protest which the police would often allow if it were small scale,” he explains. “But this type of dissent, small dissent, has been closed down in recent years.”

There are many examples of this: increased Internet censorship, which blocks words or expressions that are considered controversial or critical; crackdown on risqué Halloween costumes that mock bureaucracy; or when plainclothes men, who appeared to have been mobilized by local officials, Protesters were beaten in Henan province. external banks that had frozen their accounts.

In terms of addressing people’s mental and emotional responses to these stresses, this has also been found wanting. Specialists say China’s counseling services are grossly inadequate, leaving no outlet for those who feel isolated, lonely and depressed in modern Chinese society.

“Counselling can help build emotional resilience,” says Professor Silvia Kwok of the City University of Hong Kong, adding that China needs to increase its mental health services, especially for at-risk groups who have experienced trauma or those with mental illnesses.

“People need to find different strategies or constructive ways to deal with their emotions… making them less likely to react violently in times of intense emotional stress.”

Together, these factors suggest that Chinese society is closing down, creating a pressure cooker-like situation.

“There aren’t many people involved in mass killings. But tensions still seem to be rising, and there doesn’t seem to be any way they’re going to subside in the near future,” Magnus says.

What should worry the Communist Party are comments from the general public blaming those in power for this.

Take this comment, for example: “If the government truly acted fairly and equitably, there would not be so much anger and grievances in Chinese society… the government’s efforts have focused on creating a superficial sense of harmony. While it may “They seem to care about disadvantaged people, their actions have instead caused the greatest injustices.”

While violent attacks have increased in many countries, according to Professor Ong, the difference in China is that officials have little experience in dealing with them.

“I think the authorities are very alarmed because they haven’t seen it before and their instinct is to crack down.”

When Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke about the Zhuhai attack, he seemed to recognize that pressure was mounting in society. He urged officials across the country to “learn hard lessons from the incident, address risks at their root, resolve conflicts and disputes early, and take proactive measures to prevent extreme crime.”

But so far, lessons learned appear to have led to pushing for faster police response times using greater surveillance, rather than considering changes to the way China is governed.

“China is entering a new phase, a new phase we haven’t seen since the late 1970s,” says Professor Ong, referring to the moment when the country began to open up to the world again, triggering enormous changes.

“We need to prepare for unexpected events, such as many random attacks and emerging pockets of protest and social instability.”