China battles rare wave of violent crime as economic woes bite

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 area of Changsha in July, killing eight, following a house dispute.

In a Shanghai mall in September, a 44-year-old poor guy fatally knifed a Chinese schoolboy in Shenzhen, and a 50-year-old man fatally wound five people in a knife attack that took place in Beijing next month.

While little media coverage and popular online censorship have helped to understand the problem’s possible social roots, in some cases the intentions remain secret or unidentified.

However, the attacks have revealed the limitations of a global system of security cameras and data-driven police that ignore threats to public safety.

According to Suzanne Scoggins, an associate professor of political science at Clark University in the United States,” there is no such thing as an all-seeing, all-knowing authorities state.”

Minxin Pei, a teacher at California’s Claremont McKenna College, told AFP that” the program is very good at watching known risks, but it does a poor career dealing with previously unknown or unexplained hazards”.

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 US.

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.