A man lays flowers on Nov. 13, outside the Zhuhai People's Fitness Plaza, where a man rammed his car into a crowd of people two days earlier.Ng Han Guan/The Associated Press
After a 62-year-old man drove into a crowd of people in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai on Monday, killing 35 and injuring dozens in one of the worst incidents of violence in the country in years, President Xi Jinping urged local governments to “draw lessons from the case” and “strengthen their prevention and control of risks at the source.”
Violent crime is very rare in China, and murders even more so. But Mr. Xi’s comments, echoed by other top officials, were a rare public acknowledgment of growing unease over a series of recent high-profile incidents, including mass killings, attacks on schoolchildren and violence against foreigners.
In October, five people, including three children, were injured in a knife attack at an elementary school in Beijing. Last year, a similar incident at a kindergarten in Lianjiang, in southern China, left six people dead, including three children. In September, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was fatally stabbed outside his school in Shenzhen, the southern city bordering Hong Kong, while in June four U.S. university tutors were attacked in a park in Jilin; they all survived.
There were just 0.46 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in China in 2023, according to police statistics. By comparison, in similarly populous India, the murder rate was 2.8 last year, while the United States and Canada recorded more than four times as many homicides as China.
The reasons for this are myriad. Crime is generally lower in East Asian societies: South Korea has a similar homicide rate to China, while Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore all report even fewer murders. Surveillance and societal control are tight in China, with a high police presence in major cities. It’s also incredibly difficult to get access to firearms – which has likely kept the death toll in mass killing incidents far lower than in other countries – while even knives are regulated in parts of China where there is a history of unrest.
Reporting on such incidents is often heavily censored, and information provided by police is scant: Even years later, only the surnames of many attackers are public, while most of their victims remain anonymous. This makes understanding motive or parsing proximate causes exceptionally difficult, though police statements do occasionally mention mental-health issues or other distress.
In the case of this week’s attack in Zhuhai, the suspect, identified only by his surname, Fan, was described as a 62-year-old divorced male. According to state media, police initially concluded the incident was caused by strife over the division of marital property during his divorce. When the BBC attempted to report from outside the stadium where the incident occurred, journalists were manhandled by unidentified men.
Online, where discussion is tightly controlled, many commenters have drawn a connection between the apparent spike in high-profile incidents of violence and China’s struggling economy. Unemployment is high, and many local governments have cut back on public services amid a post-COVID-19 budget crunch: Beijing this week unveiled a 6 trillion yuan ($1.15-trillion) debt support package to try and alleviate some of this burden.
According to analysis by the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin, there were 719 incidents of strikes and other collective action by workers in the first half of 2024, up from 696 the year before. China Dissent Monitor, a project of Washington-based Freedom House, recorded more than 2,400 acts of dissent, from isolated protests and online campaigns to larger-scale unrest, across the country since January.
Lynette Ong, a distinguished professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, said there has been a confluence of issues adding to increasing societal unrest, including the lingering effects of COVID-19 lockdowns and economic strife.
Along with the recent violent incidents, Prof. Ong pointed to the viral trend of mass night cycling in Zhengzhou, in northern China, in which tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets by bike, overwhelming traffic controls and unnerving local police. Spontaneous protests by young people across the country helped spur the end of China’s tough COVID-19 controls in 2022.
“All of these things added together appear to me to be pretty strong signals of a pent-up society, a society with a lot of grievances and no pressure valve through which they can express themselves,” she said. “There has been a rise in unemployment, decline in incomes, tighter political control. People used to get angry and just go online and scold the government, but even that is more tightly controlled.”
Prof. Ong doubted whether the government had the capability to respond to such incidents with anything other than greater controls.
“They’re going to double down on repression,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they give more money to public security and appoint someone prominent to helm a task force. That’s what they did 15 years ago when social unrest climbed rapidly, they gave the security services a lot of resources to crack down on protests.”
To this point, during a high-level political meeting last week, a readout said officials were exhorted to “implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important instructions on upholding and developing the ‘Fengqiao Experience’ in the new era,” a reference to a campaign of stringent social control first popularized during the Mao Zedong era.
With reports from Alexandra Li in Beijing