RECENT FREQUENCY OF VIOLENT ATTACKS
Over a short span of nine days, China saw three instances of mass violence: On Nov 11, a man drove into a crowd in Zhuhai, killing 35 and injuring 43; on Nov 17, eight people were killed and 17 others wounded in a knife attack at a Jiangsu vocational school; on Nov 19, a car crashed outside a primary school in Hunan, injuring several students.
These incidents followed another knife attack in late October near a school in Beijing that injured five people, including three children.
Spates of “revenge on society” attacks by vehicle ramming, stabbing, arson and even planted explosives are not unheard of in China. Based on a compilation of similar incidents in a Chinese journal, a wave of four such attacks took place in Ningxia, Jiangxi, Henan and Hainan from January to February 2016.
Neither is the Nov 11 Zhuhai rampage unprecedented in terms of the toll of the dead and wounded. In June 2009, for instance, a public bus arson in Chengdu led to 28 fatalities and 74 injured.
What is striking about the recent wave of incidents is perhaps the conflation of a high number of casualties and the frequency of attacks.