“China is widely acknowledged as one of the safest countries in the world,” a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated during a press conference on Tuesday, in response to an attack in which a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop in southeastern Jiangsu Province. The official comment was similar to one made earlier this month in response to another such attack, in which a Chinese man stabbed four Americans in northeastern Jilin Province. In each case, a Chinese passerby was injured while attempting to stop the assault.
On one hand, the series of knife attacks has brought to light an unsettling truth: China may not be as safe as the Chinese government claims, and the ruling Chinese Communist Party may not be as effective in maintaining social stability as it asserts. On the other hand, the widespread international focus on these two incidents has overshadowed another truth: In most cases of random violence in China, the victims are Chinese nationals, not foreigners.
A quick search on the Chinese internet revealed several other incidents in the past month. On May 20, a man in Jiangxi Province murdered two elementary school students and injured 10 others with a knife. On May 24, a man in Hubei Province stabbed eight people, including his mother, to death. On June 1, a man in Hebei Province killed three people with a dagger and a sickle on the street. On June 19, a man attacked passengers at a subway station in Shanghai and injured three people.
These are just a few instances taken from China’s heavily censored online space. (In 2023, Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net report gave China the world’s lowest score for the ninth consecutive year.) The actual frequency of such random acts of violence could be much higher.
The Chinese government does not release specific statistics on this type of crime, but it asserts that overall violent crimes have decreased significantly over the past decade. In 2023, authorities prosecuted only 61,000 individuals for “serious violent crimes,” in a country of 1.4 billion people.
Some social media users lamented on Chinese platforms that their posts regarding the aforementioned knife attacks were censored. “You control the media, nobody knows anything, as if things never happened. That Jilin incident and now this Suzhou one, if there were no foreign media reporting, there could have been absolutely no information within the [Great Fire] wall,” a user expressed.
The identities and motivations of the attackers remain unclear, as the government often does not disclose such information. In the Jilin incident, the lack of transparency and unresponsiveness led the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, to express dissatisfaction to the American press. “I’m not satisfied that we’ve been given sufficient information as to the motives of the assailant,” Burns told the Wall Street Journal.
In a country where there is no independent press and no room for civil society, an unbiased investigation is not feasible. All that remains is speculation. In the assaults against American and Japanese citizens, many observers suspected that the Chinese government’s increasingly hostile anti-U.S. and anti-Japan propaganda had influenced the attackers. “The authorities have cultivated these nationalists for all these years, and they have now grown to be like this,” a user remarked on the social media platform Weibo.
Others have theorized that China’s economic troubles are fostering social unrest. “The most immediate societal reaction to economic downturn is the deterioration of public safety,” a user stated. “The pressure of this economic climate is trickling down to everyone, who might be pushed to the edge by a slight change in circumstances,” commented another.
Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor reveals that protests related to the economy, especially the collapse of the housing market, became more prevalent in 2023, constituting 80 percent of all recorded dissent events. In the first quarter of this year, 60 percent of dissent events were labor disputes.
Whatever motives drive the stabbings, they highlight genuine shortcomings in the Chinese government’s authoritarian rule. Because while frustration, resentment, and anger can be momentarily suppressed through authoritarian means, they will not remain hidden for long if the underlying grievances and societal issues are not addressed. And lone-wolf violence is exceedingly difficult to predict and prevent, even with the most sophisticated systems of censorship and surveillance in the world. A truly secure society can only be achieved under a government elected democratically that is responsive to the needs of its citizens and operates with transparency and respect for fundamental rights.