China reels from spate of suspected ‘revenge against society’ attacks

China is grappling with a spate of violent rampages that have left dozens of people dead, sparking a conversation about whether “revenge against society” attacks are becoming more common.

On 19 November, a 39-year-old man drove a car into a group of people near a school in Changde, a city in central China, injuring several students. Days earlier, another car-ramming attack in the southern city of Zhuhai had killed 35 people outside a sports centre, China’s deadliest mass killing in a decade. That same week, a former student in another city stabbed to death eight people and injured 17 others at a vocational college.

Little is known about true motives and the mental states of the assailants in the recent attacks. In the Zhuhai car ramming, local police said the driver was unhappy with his financial settlement in his divorce. In the stabbing incident, authorities said the attacker had failed his exams and could not graduate, and that he was unhappy with his pay on an internship.

There are growing fears in China that the strained social safety net, high unemployment and a struggling economy are leading a small minority of people to vent their frustrations in the form of mass murder. This month’s attacks followed a series of similar incidents earlier in the year.

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