Xi Jinping tries to put an end to armed attacks. What are revenge crimes against society

Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to put an end to the massacres ravaging the country. It therefore asked local governments to take measures to prevent future extreme cases, the report reported. AP.

Memorial at Zhuhai sports center where a man killed 35 people PHOTO EPA-EFE

Attacks where you intentionally hit pedestrians or where attackers randomly stab people are not a new phenomenon in China. But the recent increase in the number of such attacks has attracted the attention of central leaders.

Local authorities have rushed to investigate personal conflicts that could trigger attacks, ranging from marital problems to disagreements over inheritance.

On the other hand, potentially expanded interference in citizens' private lives is worrying at a time when the Chinese state has already significantly strengthened its control over all aspects of the Asian nation's social and political life. 'East.

Revenge crimes against society is the name the Chinese give to armed attacks.

In November alone, there were three armed attacks: a man ran over people with a car at a primary school in Hunan province, injuring 30 people, after losing his investments. A student who failed the exam stabbed and killed eight people at a vocational school in Yixing City. The largest number of victims, 35 people, was the result of an attack by a man who walked into a crowd in the city of Zhuhai, allegedly out of anger over a divorce.

While it may be difficult to precisely pinpoint the motivation behind such attacks, it relies on an overwhelming sense of pressure within Chinese society, experts say.

On the surface, it would seem that individual factors are responsible, but we see there is a common thread, said Wu Qiang, a former political science professor. In my opinion, it is the fact that everyone feels that an injustice has been committed. They have the deep feeling that this society is very unfair, has become unbearable.

Since 2015, Chinese police have targeted human rights lawyers and human rights groups, imprisoning many and keeping others under strict surveillance, destroying civil society. active from the early 2000s until the 2010s.

For example, Wu was fired from Tsinghua University after conducting research during the 2014 Hong Kong protests. He says police have been regularly present outside his home in Beijing since last year.

Prey, nnbuit

Ten years ago, the media had the ability to report on an incident as it happened and even publish the name of a suspect. Nowadays, this has become a rare occurrence.

In the 24 hours before the death toll from the mass attack in Zhuhai was released, state censors rushed to remove all videos of the incident and eyewitness accounts shared online. In the case of the attack on the Hunan primary school, authorities did not reveal the number of injured until after the sentencing, almost a month later.

A record of violent attacks is public in other countries; Notably, the United States has recorded 38 mass killings so far this year, according to an Associated Press database. But in China, a lack of public data makes it difficult to understand trends in mass killings.

From 2000 to 2010, there were many discussions, including how to help these people by making structural changes to reduce these risks, but now these have disappeared, said Rose Luqiu, a former journalist at the Phoenix television, state tenured and associate professor. at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Luqiu believes that the government's motivation for imposing censorship is based on the belief that it will prevent copycats from repeating such crimes.

Things will get more and more tense, she predicts. From the Chinese state's point of view, the only method to deal with it is to strengthen its control.

Officials promise to eliminate risks

After the Zhuhai attack, Xi called on all local governments to strengthen risk prevention and control at the source, strictly prevent extreme cases, and resolve conflicts and disputes in a timely manner, according to the news agency official Xinhua.

The AP found at least a dozen statements from local governments, from small towns to large cities, announcing measures in response to the attacks.

In eastern Anhui province, a Communist Party leader inspected a middle school, a local police station and even a chemical factory warehouse, where he urged workers to uncover any hidden dangers. He said he must thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes, especially within families, marriages and neighborhoods.

Police and prosecutors have issued similar statements.

The Justice Ministry has promised to prevent conflicts by analyzing disputes related to inheritance, housing, land and unpaid wages.

However, many expressed concerns about how such disputes would be detected.

I think we are at the start of a vicious cycle, said Lynette Ong, a professor at the University of Toronto and author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. If you extinguish the conflict from the front, you will imagine that the system will impose a lot of pressure… on schools, businesses and factories.

The roots of revenge crimes against society

There have been at least 20 such attacks in China this year, killing more than 90 people, according to a Foreign Affairs analysis of the phenomenon.

Government officials have called the incidents isolated and offered explanations emphasizing individual motivations: for example, the driver who drove into crowds in Zhuhai was unhappy with the divorce settlement. But taken together, these attacks reveal deep fractures within Chinese society, fueled by economic stagnation, systemic inequality, immobility and social exclusion.

In China, acts of violence often target random victims in public spaces and are sometimes demonstrative; in other words, the goal is not to achieve a specific goal, but to attract the attention of society.

Tight control by the Chinese Communist Party has only made the problem worse. Violence is the basis of the Chinese social order, and retaliation against society must be understood in part as a response to structural violence perpetrated by the state itself, including the silencing of dissent and other control strategies such as the one-child policy.

After the Zhuhai attack, local authorities quickly imposed a reporting ban, banned public mourning and sanitized the site.

In recent years, China's economy has struggled to meet the aspirations of an increasingly educated population. It is estimated that there will be more than 12 million new college graduates in 2025, which is a considerable oversupply when considering the country's youth unemployment rate of 18.8 percent.

The lack of meaningful employment opportunities has limited upward mobility. The exhausting workload and reduced opportunities for advancement have had a psychological impact on employees, especially younger ones. As a response, many young people have braved the panic challenge, in particular by becoming passive in the face of competitiveness, which appeared at the beginning of 2020 and implying abandoning advanced careers (and even favoring menial jobs), adopting modes of minimalist lives and renounce traditional aspirations such as marriage or owning a home or personal car, to protest the social pressures that drive relentless competition and conformity. For others, distrust has strengthened. Researchers Ma Ziqi and Zhao Yunting hypothesized that social exclusion, including ostracism due to socioeconomic status, is a driver of retaliation against societal attacks, fostering isolation, resentment, and despair .

Economic stagnation only adds fuel to the fire. In China, GDP and wage growth are slowing, while the cost of housing and education is increasing.

The economic crisis has also contributed to the exacerbation of inequalities. China's richest 1 percent now control more than 30 percent of the country's wealth, while the poorest half of the population makes up just 6 percent – a bleak picture of resource polarization in a country supposedly communist who values ​​equality and what the CCP calls common prosperity.

The legacy of state violence also plays a crucial role. China's one-child policy, implemented between 1980 and 2016, disrupted family dynamics and consisted of coercive and intrusive methods, including sterilizations and forced abortions.

One of the greatest threats to China's economy today is its profound demographic imbalance; a large number of retirees depend on the state or their children for support and too few citizens able to work.

The state has largely ignored the long-term human costs of politics, including inequality, deep distrust of government, and the destabilization of societal cohesion and political order. Even after the government reversed the one-child policy, the birth rate continued to decline rapidly, halving between 2016 (18.83 million births) and 2023 (9.02 million).

One of the most devastating consequences is the situation of shidu (bereavement) parents, who have suffered the premature death of the only child assigned to them under the old system and cannot conceive another. Each year, more than 76,000 people join this group facing particularly acute forms of marginalization. In traditional Chinese culture, children provide both emotional fulfillment and economic security to aging parents; they also confer social value, the absence of which can lead to ostracism. These problems are compounded by insufficient state support. Elderly parents who have lost their only child are eligible for a one-time payment of about $4,600, a fraction of the financial support most parents would expect to receive from their offspring.