BEIJING — An attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven children and two adults today at a kindergarten in northwest China, the latest in a string of savage assaults on the country’s schools. Eleven other children were wounded.
The killer, 48-year-old Wu Huanming, returned home after the attack on the outskirts of the city of Hanzhong and committed suicide, the local government reported.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Wu owned the property used by the school and had argued with the school’s manager, who was among the victims.
It was the fifth major assault on young students in China since late March and occurred despite increased security at schools countrywide, with gates and security cameras installed at some schools and additional police and guards posted at entrances. It was not clear if security had been beefed up at the school attacked today.
The latest deaths were sure to fuel speculation about why assailants — usually lone males — are targeting schools.
Sociologists say the recent attacks that have killed 17 and wounded more than five dozen reflect the tragic consequences of ignoring mental illness and rising stress resulting from huge social inequalities in China’s fast-changing society.
“The perpetrators have contracted a ‘social psychological infectious disease’ that shows itself in a desire to take revenge on society,” said Zhou Xiaozheng of Beijing’s Renmin University.
“They pick children as targets because they are the weakest and most vulnerable,” Zhou said.
The recent attacks are classic “copycat crimes,” the effects of which may be amplified by media coverage, Zhou said.
After past attacks, authorities have banned or limited media coverage, and early reports on today’s attack were removed from Chinese websites or moved to less prominent pages. There was no mention of it on state television’s national evening news report.
The apparent attempts to play down the assault may indicate fears that coverage inspires other assailants, but authorities may also have wanted to avoid the embarrassing news, especially during the World Expo in Shanghai, a pet government project.
The attack began at about 8:20 a.m., as children were arriving at the private Shengshui Temple Kindergarten in Hanzhong’s Nanzheng county, a Hanzhong government statement said. The area is on the city’s rural outskirts in a relatively poor part of the country, and images posted on the Internet showed the school, which had only about 20 students, housed in a tumbledown two-story farmhouse.
Wu killed the school’s manager, 50-year-old Wu Hongying, and a student on the spot, then hacked at 18 others, the statement and Xinhua said. Six students and Wu Hongying’s 80-year-old mother later died in the hospital, the reports said. None of the 11 others hospitalized was in immediate danger, it said.
Wu is a common Chinese surname and it wasn’t clear if the assailant and administrator were related.
Citing the police, Xinhua said Wu had rented his house to Wu Hongying for the kindergarten without government approval. He then demanded the property back, but Wu Hongying had asked to hold onto it until the children went on summer vacation.
The ages of the seven children killed were not disclosed, but kindergarten students would typically be 5 years old or younger. Xinhua said they were five boys and two girls.
State media have steered clear of examining what might be motivating school attackers, preferring to focus on increases in security.
The government has sought to show it has the problem under control, mindful especially of worries among middle-class families who, limited in most cases to one child due to population control policies, invest huge amounts of money and effort to raise their offspring.
The Hanzhong city government statement said all departments had been mobilized to save the wounded, find out how the attack occurred and ensure safety at all schools and kindergartens.
“Leave no stone unturned, learn from the mistakes, and strictly ensure nothing happens like this again,” the statement said.
The city government earlier reported that about 2,000 police officers and security guards had been detailed to patrol public schools, kindergartens and surrounding areas beginning last week. The city in Shaanxi province has a population of nearly 4 million.
The string of school assaults began with an attack on a primary school in March in the city of Nanping in Fujian province where eight children were slashed to death by a former community clinic doctor with a history of mental health problems.
The man convicted for that crime was executed on April 28, the same day a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the southern city of Leizhou in Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife.
The following day in Taixing city in Jiangsu province, a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an 8-inch knife wounded 29 kindergarten students — five seriously — plus two teachers and a security guard.
Just hours later, a farmer hit five elementary students with a hammer in the eastern city of Weifang before burning himself to death.
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