The surveillance state ensures peace and order – but it seems powerless against gunmen. The increase in such acts is a symptom of deeper social problems.
A city in mourning: In Zhuhai, a man drove his SUV into a group of walkers, killing 35 people.
By Han Guan / AP
This November alone, at least three men ran amok in China: a 62-year-old who drove his SUV to kill 35 people. A 21-year-old vocational student who killed eight people with a knife in the women’s dormitory at his school. And another driver who drove his car into a group of students and injured several of them. On Thursday, reports and videos emerged on social media of an additional rampage with a truck – official confirmation is still missing.
School shootings have become more frequent and serious in China. But they are not new. They are as frighteningly familiar to the Chinese as mass shootings are to Americans. Since there are very strict gun laws in China, gunmen resort to knives and axes instead of firearms or kill with their own vehicles. As in the USA, the crime scene is often the school – and the perpetrators are almost always men.
But what drives Chinese people to kill defenseless children or run over innocent passers-by? What do the shootings say about the state of Chinese society? And why are they increasing?
Currently, the discussion about this in China is heavily controlled by state censors. The authorities release details about the motives sparsely or not at all. The government speaks of isolated cases and promises quick action. Those in power in Beijing fear repeat acts. Scientists dodge questions from journalists.
“Revenge” on society
The common view in China is that a shooting spree is an act of personal revenge against a society that one feels has been deeply treated unfairly. This is also how the latest attacks by users of the Weibo platform are interpreted.
You learn through the platform that the 62-year-old gunman lost almost all of his assets in a divorce. The vocational student was denied his final diploma – after he was apparently mercilessly exploited by the factory where he had completed an internship.
According to one Investigation from 2019 by researchers Ma Ziqi and Zhao Yunting from Shanghai, most gunmen experience some kind of exclusion from society before their crime: from the job or education market, for example. Or they lacked the resources or access to institutions to advocate for their concerns. They receive no legal help, there are no arbitration bodies, or they see no other opportunity to articulate their concerns in public. Furthermore, the researchers say, it could be that they have no right to public services – unemployment compensation, health insurance or the right to send their own child to school in the city.
China’s social contract is becoming obsolete
What the researchers analyzed in 2019 is now even more relevant: unemployment is high and is likely to be much higher than the official figures show. Youth unemployment is around 20 percent. Complaints and arbitration bodies are insufficiently developed or ineffective, and there is hardly any public debate due to strict censorship. The justice system also turns out to be arbitrary in some cases. Migrant workers in particular, of whom there are millions in China, are treated as second-class citizens in the cities and excluded from social benefits.
As long as the economy is going well, many of these social deficiencies remain under the radar. Because then there is the opportunity to improve your own standard of living through performance. Implicitly, many Chinese have understood exactly this as a kind of social contract with the government: the Communist Party has all political power. In return, she has to ensure that people get better from year to year.
However, the current economic downturn has made this social contract no longer valid for many. The feeling of optimism has given way to a feeling of powerlessness in China. Many people ask themselves how it can be that they have worked hard all their life and now have to go into debt and lose first their job, then their house, then their wife.
“The Chinese only know one definition of success”
But the increase in personal crises, triggered by the weakening economy alone, does not explain why there are more rampages with serious consequences, says Xiang Biao, director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute in Halle. “People in China have forgotten the ability to deal with these crises,” says Xiang in an interview.
Xiang explains that the majority of Chinese people only knew one way to a successful life: study, get a good job, earn a lot of money, get married, and buy a house. “This narrow definition of the meaning of life is very fragile.” Anyone who does all of this but still does not receive the expected reward for it finds it difficult to accept it.
Stable relationships are like a safety net in personal crises, says Xiang, but many people complain of loneliness. In China, family relationships are exploited as a status symbol. “If your marriage breaks up, you lose your wealth and social standing in one fell swoop.”
This finding is partly consistent with research results from Germany. Criminologist Britta Bannenberg has been carrying out amok for years examined. She also says that perpetrators often fail in their careers and families and have no friends. She also found that many of the perpetrators suffered from mental illnesses such as psychoses or narcissistic-paranoid personality disorder. The latter manifests itself, among other things, in an increased need for recognition and in perceiving the world as hostile and developing thoughts of revenge against it.
It remains unclear whether Chinese attack perpetrators also have mental illnesses. Mental health care in China is well below the global average. People with mental illness are stigmatized, which prevents many from seeking professional help. Law professor Gao Yandong called for China to do more to address the mental health crisis in an article Monday on news site Guancha.cn.
The almost three years of strict anti-corona policies in China are likely to have triggered trauma and increased existing psychological problems. People were sometimes locked up for weeks or even months, only to then return to everyday life as if nothing had happened. That leaves traces.
Government largely powerless against it
China is considered one of the safest countries in the world. Government crime statistics show that violent crime occurs much less often than the global average. Smaller protests occur again and again, but the security forces usually break them up quickly before unrest breaks out. There are cameras on every corner in big cities; Police officers and security service employees are part of the cityscape.
In view of the school shootings, some local governments’ solution approach is now to monitor “risky individuals” more closely, including the unemployed, divorced and unmarried people or people without a home or a car. Also those who have recently experienced a setback, such as major losses of assets, mental illnesses, humiliation in everyday life.
These are approaches that social anthropologist Xiang Biao considers unjustified and counterproductive. By classifying them as potential criminals, groups of people who are already stigmatized become even more stigmatized. Instead, we need to solve the root of the problem – reform the education system, the work culture, the general understanding of the meaning of life, says Xiang.
Beijing justifies its massive surveillance state by protecting public safety. However, it is precisely this feeling of security that is increasingly becoming an illusion as mass shootings increase. The government seems powerless against it.
