A series of violent attacks across China in recent months have pierced the veneer of stability in a tightly controlled society. At the end of September, a 37-year-old man killed three people and injured 15 others in a stabbing at a Shanghai supermarket. In October, a 50-year-old man injured five people in a knife attack in Beijing. Then, on November 11, a 62-year-old man drove into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing 35 people and injuring 43 others in what is believed to be one of China’s deadliest acts of criminal violence in decades. In the following days, a mass stabbing by a 21-year-old student killed eight and injured 17 at a vocational school in Wuxi, near Shanghai, and a car crash injured several schoolchildren and parents outside a primary school in northern Hunan province. .
There have been at least 20 such attacks in China this year, killing more than 90 people. Government officials have called these cases “isolated” and offered explanations that emphasize individual motivations: for example, the driver in the Zhuhai car attack was unhappy with his divorce; The Wuxi striker had failed his exams. But together, the attacks reveal deep and widespread fractures in Chinese society fueled by economic stagnation, systemic inequality, and social immobility and exclusion. As a result, such incidents have come to be called “revenge against society” attacks.
comparative study published in the journal Journal of Threat Assessment and Management In 2022, it was found that China accounted for 45 percent of reported mass stabbings around the world between 2004 and 2017. Its share may be due not only to the widespread availability of knives and strict gun control, but also to socio-political tensions, including severe economic stress. Acts of violence in China often target random victims in public spaces and are sometimes performative; In other words, the purpose is not to achieve a certain goal, but to attract the attention of society. While the state’s extensive censorship apparatus effectively stifles broad public discussion of the mass attacks, the California-based nonprofit China Digital Times has documented a surge in online activity after such incidents — indicating strong public interest — before censorship wipes out messages.
The Chinese Communist Party’s tight control has only exacerbated the problem. Violence underpins China’s social order, and retaliation against societal attacks should be understood in part as a response to structural violence perpetrated by the state itself, including the silencing of dissent and other control strategies such as the one-child policy. Public attacks are often reactions to repression; The irony is that the government usually responds to them with even more repression. After the attack in Zhuhai, for example, local authorities quickly imposed a reporting ban, publicly denied mourning and disinfected the site. And the state mobilizes its legal and supervisory capabilities to implement top-down short-term stability, the hallmark of the CCP’s crisis management.
Such responses come at the expense of actions to address the underlying problems that fuel retaliation against societal attacks. If the CPP clings to a centralized, authoritarian form of governance, social fractures will inevitably increase. Without systemic reforms to address these issues, China risks fostering a cycle of frustration and unrest that could lead to increasing violence and even threaten the country’s long-term stability.
DEEP ROOTS
In recent years, China’s economy has struggled to meet the demands of an increasingly educated population. In 2025, more than 12 million new college graduates are predicted to graduate, which is a huge oversupply considering the country’s 18.8 percent youth unemployment. (In reality, the proportion is probably higher, since the data does not include active students.) The lack of meaningful employment opportunities has placed limitations on upward mobility. The burdensome workload and decreasing advancement opportunities have taken a toll on employees, especially the younger ones, psychologically. In response, many young people have embraced quiet defiance, including through the “lying” movement that emerged in early 2020, which involves avoiding advanced careers (and even favoring blue-collar or gig work), a minimalist lifestyle, and abandoning traditional aspirations. such as marriage or owning a home or a car to resist societal pressures that encourage relentless competition and conformity. For others, the defiance has become tougher. Researchers Ma Ziqi and Zhao Yunting have hypothesized that “social exclusion,” which can include the feeling of being systematically blocked from economic advancement or marginalized due to socioeconomic status, is a retaliatory force against societal attacks, as such exclusion increases isolation, resentment, and despair. .
Economic stagnation only fuels the flames. In China, both GDP growth and wage growth are slowing, and housing and education costs are rising. These developments increase economic uncertainty among the Chinese and undermine their hopes for a stable and prosperous future under the current system. There is financial pressure also helped to worsen inequality. China’s richest one percent now control more than 30 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half of the population controls just six percent — a stark picture of the polarization of resources in a supposedly communist country that values egalitarian outcomes and what the CCP calls “shared prosperity.”
The legacy of state violence is also critical. China’s one-child policy, implemented from 1980 to 2016, disrupted family dynamics and resorted to coercive measures, including forced sterilizations and abortions. Although the policy achieved the goal of slowing population growth, one of the most significant threats to China’s economy is the resulting deep demographic imbalance: a large number of aging pensioners are dependent on the state or their children for support, and too few people in prime working age. The state largely ignored the long-term human costs of the policy, including persistent inequality, deepening distrust of government, and the erosion of social cohesion and political order. In fact, even after the government scrapped the one-child policy, the birth rate continued its rapid decline, halving between 2016 (18.83 million births) and 2023 (9.02 million). This was partly due to the policy’s lasting socio-economic effects: among other things, it both normalized small families and instilled the belief that having many – or any – children could derail a couple’s finances and career.
One of the most destructive consequences of politics is distress shidu (“sureavement”) parents who have suffered the premature death of the only child granted to them under the old system and cannot conceive. Every year, more than 76,000 parents join this group, which faces particularly acute forms of exclusion. In traditional Chinese culture, children provide both emotional satisfaction and financial security for aging parents; they also provide social value, the absence of which can lead to marginalization. These problems are exacerbated by insufficient government support; elderly parents who have lost an only child are eligible for a lump sum government payment of about $4,600, a fraction of the financial support most parents expect to receive from their offspring. Shidu parents embody the wider consequences of authoritarian rule. By prioritizing welfare management, it promotes systemic neglect that increases social ills and can ultimately promote societal retribution. A recent Chinese film documentary told how despair one shidu the pair even pushed them to the brink of public attack.
Structural inequalities have sparked various protests in recent years: shidu for example, parents protest annually in front of the National Health and Family Planning Commission headquarters in Beijing to demand that the state keep its promises of care and support; In 2022, people staged mass mortgage payment boycotts to protest the housing crisis and “white paper” protests against strict measures under China’s “zero COVID” policy. These cries highlight the growing discontent between different groups and for many represent a protest against decades of oppression. For most Chinese, the current state violence is a continuation of the more totalitarian oppression they suffered under Mao Zedong from the early 1950s to the decades-long Cultural Revolution that ended with Mao’s death in 1976. People had no means in brutal times. the violence of that era, given the state’s total control over the country’s resources and narrative. Those days are long gone, but the legacy of violence lives on.
DROVE ME CRAZY ONCE
Together, these forces have led to an accumulation of economic, social, and psychological stresses that have little chance of release. And unresolved grievances have helped create a climate where people embrace violence out of desperation. The repressive regime of the CCP only worsens the crisis. In responding to violent attacks or mass expressions of discontent, the party has, in its history of thirst for control, relied on a few main strategies that are likely to only get stronger. The most important are enhanced supervision and police activity. China’s already vast surveillance infrastructure—advanced facial recognition, social credit scoring, AI-based surveillance—is expanding even further. New technologies such as the Crowd Emotion Detection and Early Warning Device system, which authorities claim can analyze the behavior and emotions of large groups of people, could be used to detect unrest. emphasizes state efforts not only to respond to attacks but to prevent them altogether. The additional measures, such as increased police presence near schools and in public spaces and heightened surveillance during politically sensitive times, evoke security patterns in regions such as Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has systematically suppressed Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities for years. becomes a de facto provincial police state.
As sociologist Xueguang Zhou has pointed out, the CCP’s approach is based not only on mobilization but also on propaganda, which is compatible with the party’s censorship and narrative control. The rapid removal of critical comments on social media and the suppression of public debate ensure that mass attacks are framed as isolated incidents rather than symptoms of deeper systemic failures. By controlling the narrative, the CCP aims to prevent public outrage and instances of copycats while maintaining its image of authority. But these draconian measures, in turn, increase feelings of alienation and unease among the Chinese people, increasing the risk of further attacks.
Wu Si, former editor-in-chief of history magazine Yanhuang Chunqiuhas said that “hidden rules” govern Chinese society – informal systems that are “neither ethical nor fully legal” but still maintain the social fabric. But the growing retaliation against society’s attacks suggests that the party’s indifference to certain rights and suppression of dissent may have an unintended effect: an increase in violence that may seem apolitical but is a desperate rejection of the political status quo. . And if the party fails to expand economic opportunity and reduce structural inequality and injustice, it may ultimately face greater challenges than retaliating against societal attacks.
Loading…