Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered local governments to crack down after a series of violent crimes that shocked China, which some view as “revenge on society” crimes in the tightly controlled country.
A man plowed his SUV into a crowd of people, killing 35 people, last month in Zhuhai; a man killed three people in a stabbing spree in a Shanghai supermarket in September and a man injured five people in a knife attack in Beijing.
Jinping directed the local authorities to prevent future “extreme cases,” the Associated Press reported.
While local officials attributed the mayhem to personal disputes, marital trouble and squabbles over inheritance, many also blame the Chinese state’s iron grip on all aspects of social and political life.
“On the surface, it seems like there are individual factors, but we see there’s a common link,” Wu Qiang, a former political science professor, told the Associated Press.
“This link is, in my personal opinion, every person has a feeling of injustice. They feel deeply that this society is very unfair and they can’t bear it anymore,” Wu said.
Since 2015, authorities in China have clamped down on human rights lawyers and advocates, putting many of them in jail, and stepped up the monitoring of others, in a dramatic display of curtailing people’s rights under a cloak of censorship and surveillance.
Qiang, who was fired from Tsinghua University during the 2014 Occupy protests in Hong Kong, said police officers have been routinely stationed outside his Beijing home since last year.
Rose Luqiu, a journalist with state-owned Phoenix Television and an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, said the Chinese government may be ramping up enforcement of censorship to prevent copycats from committing violent acts.
“Things will only become more and more strict,” she told the AP. For the Chinese state, “the only method to deal with it is to strengthen control.”
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