Seven children hacked to death in China school attack

Source: Reuters

Seven children were "hacked to death" in an attack on a kindergarten in northwest China on Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported, the latest in a string of assaults on children that has alarmed the public.

Read more: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100512/tpl-uk-china-school-attack-39349ed.html

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WTF

What did the kids do? Good grief.

:cry:

If there are attacks on schools happening in a weird, related way, wouldn't the govt. over there perhaps think it is time to post police or guards at the freakin doors???

I have one daughter in kindergarten and one in her last year of preschool. If this was happening in the US I would be freaking out right now. Feel terrible for the parents....

Fuck!

Some sort of horrible psychic virus that has entered the culture's subconscious.

I'm in the business of understanding aberrant behavior, but this string of attacks makes no sense whatsoever. Horrible. Horrible.

i would guess that it has something to do with the chinese policies of child rearing (amount of children permitted per couple) and the high number of kidnappings and other drama resulting from these policies. i would think this drives some parents of the cliff.

as this is becoming so common.

Can anyone clue me in- what does it mean that older people are breaking into schools and doing this repeatedly?

being a "cultural thing"?

How many attacks does this make now?

...in a month.

Christ -- it's open season on little kids and the media is like, "In other news..."

Other than crawlers, I don't think I've seen a story on this yet.

...but I understand where you're coming from.

So many questions that China probably won't answer under their, "it's an internal affair" rules.

I'm going to take a wild-ass guess that it is ethnic retaliation. I only say so because it's children. Hit them where it hurts. The L.A. shootings and Russia's school shootings are weighing heavily on my mind when I read about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/asia/13china.html


HONG KONG — Seven kindergarteners were hacked to death and more than 20 other schoolchildren were injured on Wednesday in an attack at a school in northwest China, local authorities told the state news agency Xinhua.

The attack occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Nanzheng County, in Shaanxi Province, Xinhua said.

success? That their lives are so wretched that they have to kill children to have any power?

I am stunned by the recent spate of attacks on school children. I wonder if the reason is that the people committing the attacks want to inflict a similar pain on society as they feel society is inflicting on them? With the bureaucracy and the one child policy, hurting and killing young children may be one way these people think they can get back at the world which, they perceive, has hurt them.

China is very careful with the details they release. Are the victims predominantly boys or girls? Are the suspects men or women? Are there more attacks than have been reported?

In Chinese culture the idea of having a son is very important. Basically when a woman marries, she become's part of her husband's family, so if you don't have a son, when you die that means there'll be nobody to burn incense for you in the afterlife.

That might sound kinda trivial and silly to western ears but keeping the memory of your parents and grandparents alive is very important in Chinese culture. My in-laws are Vietnamese-Chinese. Like most families from mainland Asia, they have a shrine in the house which includes small statues and pictures of Chinese gods, my father-in-law's parents and grandparents, and incense, flowers, fruit and cups of wine. Every morning my mother in law burns incense and prays for about 10 minutes, and every evening my father-in-law does the same thing. Once every lunar month they buy a big pile of Chinese food which is left in front of the shrine for several hours and then put on the kitchen table after evening prayer, at which point the whole family (including me) are expected to show up and share it. and there are other ceremonies at seasonal and annual intervals, and for anniversaries and so on.

It's all pretty elaborate - and yet my in-laws are not particularly religious people. This is just something that most Asian families do as a matter of course. When our parents pass away we'll have a shrine too, though we figure we might as well include both sides of our family rather than just mine. My point is that while it's rooted in religious/superstitious ideas, the family-history thing is at the very roots of Asian culture. It's much more important to have your little shrine and keep it nice than it is to go to a temple or anything like that.

So, with all this preference for sons and with the one-child policy, China now has the problem that the ratio of men to women is way high, especially in the cities, largely through selective abortions. I forget the exact number, but something like 6 to 5. So in a country with a billion people, that's tens of millions of men who won't be able to find a wife and have a family of their own, and in traditional Chinese culture this basically means your entire life is a failure because you are responsible for the family dying out. Bear in mind that China operated as an empire which was largely closed to the world until 100 years ago, so whatever you think of the current semi-communist political system they have, it's not possible to rewrite 3-4,000 years of cultural practice.

The one-child policy is already pretty drastic in a culture where the tradition is to have a lot of children, and in fact it is not as strictly applied as it used to be. but if they hadn't put that policy in place, their population would probably be 30-40% larger and all past experience is that the result would be regular famines. So it's a choice between limiting family sizes or have a food crisis every 10 years which results in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

So basically, when you hear of these knife attacks, they are of course driven by individual people going mad but in most cases it turns out that the reason they did so was failure to get married, end of the family line which is the Chinese equivalent of going to hell and being eaten by demons, and the person goes crazy and wants to take several other families with him.

There isn't really an easy answer on how to deal with it - and yes, they are trying all the obvious things like more security and making it easier for people to marry someone from outside China and so on. But any social problem scaled up to a society of a billion people is difficult to handle.

Thanks for this perspective

It sheds some light on possible causes.

I am speechless, horrible

Extremely horrible

....what could possibly be the motivation for these attacks?....it totally boggles my mind....

....when there's less and less value of life, then the unthinkable becomes thinkable....nuclear annihilation becomes mere collateral damage....