Lone madmen without guns

ALL month schools in China have been on what the state-controlled press calls a “red alert” for possible attacks on pupils by intruders. In one city police have orders to shoot perpetrators on sight. Yet a spate of mass killings and injuries by knife or hammer-wielding assailants has continued. To the government's consternation, some Chinese have been wondering aloud whether the country's repressive politics might be at least partly to blame.

In the latest reported incident, on May 12th, seven children and two adults were hacked to death at a rural kindergarten in the northern province of Shaanxi. Eleven other children were injured. It was one of half a dozen such cases at schools across China in less than two months. Three attacks occurred on successive days in late April, when more than 50 children were injured. The previous deadliest attack killed eight children in the southern province of Fujian on March 23rd. The killer was executed on April 28th.

This has been embarrassing for a leadership fond of trumpeting its goal of a “harmonious society”. In 2004, two years after Hu Jintao became China's top leader, he and his colleagues called for better security at schools. But occasional attacks continued. Assailants were often said to be lone, deranged, men venting their frustrations on the weak. A report last year in the Lancet, a British medical journal, said that of 173m Chinese it estimated were suffering from mental illness, fewer than 10% had seen a mental-health professional (see article). Knives are the weapons of choice in China, where firearms are hard to obtain.

Over the May Day break, officials ordered yet another boosting of school security. The Communist Party's law-and-order chief, Zhou Yongkang, called it an “urgent political task”. When classes resumed after the holiday, police patrols were stepped up near schools. Some hired security guards and equipped themselves with pepper spray, nets and pronged poles. In Beijing, the authorities say that since the March 23rd attack they have prevented seven unspecified “incidents aimed at schools” with the arrest of ten suspects. On May 3rd police shot dead a man who took a child hostage in a residential area of the capital.

The recent violence has come at a bad time for the government, anxious as it is to project a positive image during the six-month World Expo in Shanghai, which began on May 1st. The authorities regard the expo as similar in importance to the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

Chinese media gave little prominence to the latest killings and largely stuck to reports issued by the government news agency, Xinhua. Their reticence could reflect fears of copycat crimes, or simply the old habit of suppressing news during big events. During the Olympics, one provincial propaganda department ordered that negative reports be “strictly controlled” and that there must above all be no reports on “problems that give the Western media a pretext for launching attacks, such as issues concerning press freedom, air quality, food safety, democracy, religion and legal issues”.

But some online commentators in China have been less restrained. Han Han, one of the country's most popular bloggers (and a huge irritant to the authorities), wrote that killing the weak was seen by the attackers as the most effective way of exacting revenge on a society “that has no way out”. He said that local governments should send the guards at official buildings to help protect schools, “because a government that can't protect children doesn't need so many people to protect itself”.

Even in the official media there has been the odd hint of dissent. A newspaper in the central province of Henan said that while the West had many NGOs that could help people suffering from mental distress, in China there were very few. This, it said, led to problems becoming bottled up and eventually erupting in violence. But if more NGOs are what is needed to relieve China's social tensions, the prospects just now look bleak. One of the country's most prominent NGO leaders, Wan Yanhai, has just fled to America to escape police harassment. His complaints are widely shared.

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