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Chinese Preschoolers Hurt in New Attack
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Continuing a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren, a man broke into a primary school in eastern China on Friday and beat five preschool children with a hammer before setting himself afire, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The attacker, identified as Wang Yonglai, died at the scene, Xinhua quoted police officers as saying. The five children were reported to be in stable condition in a hospital in Weifang, the city in Shandong Province where the attack took place.
It was the fourth assault on Chinese students in little more than a month, and the third in three days. On Thursday, a 47-year-old unemployed man stabbed 28 children and 3 adults at a kindergarten in Jiangsu Province, on China’s east coast just south of Shandong.
On Wednesday, a 33-year-old ex-teacher with a history of mental illness stabbed 15 children at a primary school in Leizhou, in Guangdong Province.
That attack occurred on the same day the authorities executed another man, 42-year-old Zheng Minsheng, for a March 23 knife attack at a primary school in Fujian Province that left eight children dead.
Criminal psychologists have speculated that the recent attacks, though spread far apart in distance, are copycat crimes, inspired by the intense public reaction and broad media coverage of the March 23 murders.
Friday’s assault began at 7:40 a.m., Xinhua reported, when Mr. Wang drove his motorbike to Shangzhuang primary school and broke in, overcoming a teacher.
Wielding a hammer, Mr. Wang struck five students, grabbed another two, then doused himself with gasoline and ignited it. Teachers managed to save the two children.
In Thursday’s attack, many of the wounded children were just 4 years old and shared the same classroom, according to Xinhua. Police officers identified the assailant as Xu Yuyuan, a former insurance agent. According to Xinhua, he began attacking children with a knife about eight inches long around 9 a.m. at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, a middle-class school in Taixing, about 570 miles southeast of Beijing. He also wounded two teachers and a security guard.
The attacker on Wednesday struck in the southern province of Guangdong, stabbing 15 fourth and fifth graders at a primary school in Leizhou. None of those students were seriously wounded. The authorities said that attacker, identified as Chen Kangbing, had taught at a nearby school but had been on leave since 2006, apparently because of mental illness.
On March 23, Mr. Zheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, also on China’s east coast. Some news reports stated that Mr. Zheng also had mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed.
Mental illness remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor modern psychiatric treatment is widely used. An analysis of mental health issues in four Chinese provinces, published in June in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated that 91 percent of the 173 million Chinese adults that are believed to suffer mental problems never receive professional help.
Mr. Zheng’s attack stirred calls for a school safety crackdown. Mr. Zheng was executed on Wednesday after what one legal expert, He Weifang, a former Peking University law professor and civil rights advocate, said was an unusually speedy trial.
There was no immediate explanation as to why the four attackers chose young students as their targets. While assaults in schools are not particularly common, an eerily similar series of five knife attacks took place in August and September 2004 in schools and a child care center. Three of those attacks occurred on China’s east coast.
In February 2008, two students at another Leizhou school were stabbed to death by a former student who then killed himself by jumping off the school building.
The assaults were likely to be acts of self-destruction, said Liu Jianqing, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, on Thursday, because such crimes stand a high chance of drawing a death sentence.
Some experts like Mr. He said that beyond mental illness, rising strains in China’s fast-changing society might have a role in the growing number of violent crimes. Most school assaults have occurred on the east coast, where both the cost of living and income inequality are high.
The man executed on Wednesday, Mr. Zheng, wanted revenge on “rich” and “powerful officials” in Nanping, where he lived, Xinhua said, quoting his neighbors.
An earlier version of this article misidentified the province where Leizhou is located. It is in Guangdong Province, not Shandong. In describing the Weifang attack, it also misidentified the attacker once. It was Mr. Wang, not Mr. Xu.
Zhang Jing, Li Bibo and Xiyun Yang contributed research.
reposted from nytimes.