Drama to Zhuhai (Guangdong), November 11: on the eve of the opening of the famous air show which takes place every year in this city of 2.5 million inhabitants, located near Macau, a motorist drove his SUV into the crowd gathered in front of a sports complex, killing 35 people and seriously injuring 43 others, according to official figures. This is one of the deadliest attacks in contemporary history of China. Police said the 62-year-old driver, surnamed Fan, was arrested and hospitalized with allegedly self-inflicted injuries to his neck and other parts of his body using a knife. The motive for the killing would be personal: Fan would have been “upset” by the division of property during divorce.
This car-ramming attack is part of a close series of similar eventswhat remains surprising and a little worrying for a country as totally and severely controlled as China and whose budget in terms of public safety is higher than that allocated to the army. In October, a knife attack in a large school in Beijing left five people injured, while in September, a man stabbed three people to death in a supermarket in Shanghaiinjuring several others… Also in September, a 10-year-old Japanese student died in Shenzhen after being stabbed near his écoleoften targeted in China by individuals seeking revenge on society.
From this perspective, should the attack on Zhuhai be considered as yet another news item or like a social phenomenon which would be the sign of a new excitement of the Chinese giant?
It would be wrong to draw from this type of incident a general education on China which would help explain its occurrence. There is indeed a line to be drawn between, on the one hand, considering the event as anecdotal and assert that discussing it would amount to a form of China-bashing on the part of Europeans who want to forget their own moral decadence, and on the other, consider this attack as the reflection of a general spiritual malaise of the Chineseoppressed by the blind authoritarianism of Xi Jinping and unable to express their discontent in a different way than in undifferentiated mass crime.
It is obvious that if we look at the numbers of deaths in mass killings in the United States (more than 600 deaths per year since 2020 and 385 deaths in 2024), we would be entitled to speak of an even sicker society. However, this type of incident remains very minority in European countries, without much being able to be deduced about the mental health of these nations. In France, if they arrive, it is because of a particular ideologymost often recently within the framework of the Islamist terrorist movement…
On the other hand, there is one point on which the Zhuhai massacre deserves our attention and which most distinguishes China among all the other countries in the world, and that is in the way in which the power reactsbecause it is not the killing which is symptomatic, but rather the incapacity and total refusal of the political apparatus to face it.
In fact, the Chinese authorities took almost 24 hours to officially recognize the incident, despite numerous images – afterwards censored – broadcast on social networks on the evening of November 11 showing dozens of people thrown to the ground and a car fleeing the scene… The outraged comments on the delay of the authorities to report the killing were also deleted, and the Weibo platform censored a hashtag which mentioned the number of deaths. Furthermore, in a public gesture of sympathy and in a manifestation collective de compassioncandles and flowers were left on site by dozens of anonymous people in front of one of the doors of the sports complex. But very quickly, the authorities of the city of Zhuhai removed all the wreaths, candles and offerings placed at the scene of the massacre.
This is what the event is strongly symbolic of so-called People’s China and its human and moral limits: what is more cruel than preventing expression of mourning ? Thus, in communist China, happiness is a national duty and sadness, a punishable crime. Only good is permitted, evil is prohibited. More precisely, if evil exists, it cannot in any way be the act of the Chinese themselves.
We must realize one thing: the 35 sudden deaths in the Zhuhai incident of November 2024 exceed the deaths caused by 2014 Uyghur attacks (33 deaths in knife attacks) which had precipitated a radical police reaction having led to the confinement of a million people according to certain NGOs and massive surveillance of an entire population. If a Chinese kills 35 compatriots, the event must be erased from memories ; if it is a non-Han, this will induce the crystallization of a national trauma. This is why there were no Chinese deaths on June 3 and 4, 1989 at Tiananmen; it is an ethnic impossibility: evil can only come from the Other. If evil is perpetrated by one of our own, it is no longer an incident, but a heresy which contradicts the state religion and which must be erased. Because the state justifies its authoritarian mandate in bringing happiness and security to 1.4 billion Chinese; it is a fact which cannot suffer from any contradiction.
By Jean-Yves Heurtebise
