Eight killed in second mass attack in China in a week

A former student went on a stabbing rampage at a vocational college in eastern China, killing eight people and injuring 17, police said on Sunday, just days after the deadliest mass killing in the country in a decade shocked Chinese society.

Saturday evening’s knife attack took place at the Wuxi Vocational College of Arts and Technology in Yixing, part of Wuxi city in the eastern province of Jiangsu. The suspect was apprehended at the scene and confessed, police said.

Also on Saturday, authorities in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai said they had charged a 62-year-old man after a driver on Monday rammed his car into a crowd killing 35 people and injuring 43.

The Zhuhai incident touched off a rare online discussion over the mental health of Chinese society and whether a string of recent high-profile attacks in other major cities could reflect deeper stresses as the world’s second-largest economy slows.

At least six other high-profile knife attacks have been recorded this year across China.

Police in Wuxi said the stabbing suspect was angry over not getting his graduation certificate and failing an exam. The Zhuhai suspect was reportedly angry at the terms of a divorce settlement.

“According to preliminary investigations, the suspect, surname Xu – male, 21 years old, a 2024 graduate of the college – attacked others after failing an exam and not receiving his graduation certificate, as well as being dissatisfied with his internship compensation,” the Yixing Public Security Bureau said in a statement.

The recent flare of violence has prompted a heavily censored online discussion on the toll of the economic slowdown and whether young people will find themselves worse off than the generations before them that benefited from China’s rapid development.

One online commentator said the Wuxi attack appeared to reflect a sense of entitlement for a generation that had not expected hardship, a “giant baby mentality”.

“Always thinking that they are so aggrieved, everyone is persecuting me, I study and struggle just to be a beast of burden,” one person wrote on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Sunday.

“I want to ‘lie flat’, I want to rot, but still want to have this and that, I want to have what others have,” the post said.