School knife attacks and syphilis

School security on the front page

The latest Sinica podcast is up on Pop Up Chinese, (a website that offers excellent podcast and live one-on-one lessons in Mandarin and Cantonese):

In the absence of Sinica’s big chief Kaiser Kuo, I am the host, talking to:

• Gady Epstein, Beijing bureau chief for Forbes magazine;

• China public relations expert Will Moss, aka Imagethief;

• Qin Liwen, author, columnist, co-founder of excellent Chinese group blog Mind Meters, and of the Beijing bookstore One Way Street.

Our topics: Chinese schoolyard violence, and recent news about the wildfire spread of syphilis in China.

Despite efforts to downplay the story in the face of the Shanghai Expo, news of a recent wave of copycat killings has spread quickly through China, driven in part by the surprising revelation that many of the killers have been middle-aged and apparently well-educated men. Online, some netizens have blamed the government, which in turn blames social contradictions. Writing for the Daily Telegraph, Malcolm Moore summarizes these attacks as a “turning point” created by alienation engendered over the last twenty years of China’s industrialization. Where does the truth lie?

You can listen to the Sinica podcast or grab it as a standalone MP3 file standalone mp3 fileon Popup Chinese, or subscribe to the series on iTunes: Open up iTunes, click on the “Advanced” menu and select “Subscribe to Podcast”; when prompted, copy the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica into the box.

Further thoughts – a post script to the podcast

China school knife attacks – media reports in English

As Qin Liwen pointed out after we had finished recording the podcast, we had all neglected our homework: these killings are not without precedent. In 2004, there was a similar spate of knife attacks at schools, as you can see from the chart above from Google News, which shows the incidence of the words “China school knife attack” occurring in English news reports online since 1990.

You can read more about the 2004 attacks by clicking the Google News link above or at the links at the bottom of the article.

Whereas it seems most of the killers in the recent spree of attacks have been middle aged, the killers 2004 spree were mostly younger, in their early 20s.

Another point worth considering is that knife attacks are quite frequent in China. A Google News search similar to the above but in Chinese for “校园刀杀案” （school knife killings) shows spikes in 2004, 2006 and 2010, but there are plenty of reports in the intervening years.

China school knife attacks – media reports in Chinese

Note that many of the knife attacks in the other years are not mass attacks on students but individual murder cases where students have been attacked, or themselves stabbed classmates, teachers or family members, so the two charts are directly comparable.