Mass Attacks in China Spark Concern, Censorship

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Violent attacks spark public concern and censorship, Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the annual G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary pick could cause tensions with China.

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Three attacks within a week in China have sparked widespread public concern and triggered attempts to cover up discussion of the news. The first was on Nov. 11 in the city of Zhuhai, the site of a prominent annual air show; at least 35 people were killed when a man drove a SUV into a group of joggers in a sports center. It was the deadliest public violence in China in decades.

Then, last Saturday, a former student carried out a knife rampage at a vocational school in Wuxi that killed eight people. The third incident came on Tuesday, when another driver in an SUV targeted a crowd outside an elementary school in Changde: The number of casualties is still unknown and may be more heavily censored given the growing sensitivity of the news.

Online censors rapidly attempted to remove any sign of the Zhuhai attack, deleting discussions and videos; police removed flowers placed at the site, and a BBC China reporter at the scene was threatened. This reaction may be in part because of the sensitivity of the airshow, which displays some of China’s most advanced military technology, as well as the scale of the attack. With the car attack on Tuesday, there is also a fear of copycat killings.

Another dynamic at play is the need for a scapegoat. As local party secretaries described it in interviews in 2005, “Like scared birds, we are on high alert every day, worrying about workplace safety, sudden events, mass petitions, and other large-scale incidents that could result in punishment.”

When a government failure goes public, such as in the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in 2020, a “scapegoating conflict” occurs as officials try to shift blame onto one another. Still, the initial instinct among officials is almost always to cover up events and prevent public outrage from growing.

Yet the totalizing demands of the party-state, in which local leaders’ main duty is preventing so-called social unrest, mean that events beyond their control are seen as their responsibility—both by their bosses and potentially by the public. Party cadres have a huge remit, which means they can also be blamed for a large range of problems.

There is no evidence that any of the recent attacks were political incidents—or that official action could have prevented them. The Zhuhai attacker, a 62-year-old man, appears to have been angry about the terms of his divorce. The Wuxi attacker was mad about a low-paid internship and a failed exam. Like many mass shooters in the United States, the attackers in China used the tools they had available to take out their rage on society.

Nevertheless, officials will be demoted, fined, or fired over the attacks—which will continue to be censored. This all creates a cycle of outrage and repression. When I arrived in Shijiazhuang in 2002, it was months before anyone mentioned the terror that gripped the city the year before, when a series of bombings killed at least 108 people. They were blamed on a disgruntled worker with a history of violence, who was quickly executed along with two accomplices.

But there were numerous rumors about the Shijiazhuang attacks, especially because the city had experienced another series of bombings on buses in 2000. Rumors blamed gang warfare and former soldiers. With each incident, there were claims that the death toll was significantly higher than the government admitted and that the perpetrators had been scapegoated.

Similar rumors are making the rounds about the recent attacks. The 2001 bombings resulted in a crackdown that restricted the availability of explosives. It’s unlikely that the government has any answer for these attacks except the usual one: more security and more censorship.

Xi at the G-20 summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping is attending the annual G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he will likely hold his last meeting with outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden. In an initial meeting, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer raised human rights issues in China with Xi, prompting Chinese officials present to shuffle British journalists from the room.

That may be a sign that the British Labour government, which has taken a softer approach to China than the Conservatives, won’t give up on certain issues, such as Hong Kong. A new round of draconian sentences for Hong Kong democracy advocates has fired up supporters of the democracy movement currently in exile in the United Kingdom.

Xi and Biden, who met at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation event last Saturday in Peru, seemed to largely direct messages about their attempt to find a working relationship in the last two years. Both emphasized working meetings and mutual talks, although as usual the two sides’ readouts differed, with China citing “red lines” on Taiwan, democracy, and “China’s path and system.”

South China Sea hot spot. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is conducting naval and aerial patrols around the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, a flash point in its long-running conflict with the Philippines over maritime limits. It also delimited the island as part of an ongoing cartographic campaign.

The Philippines also passed new laws reasserting its maritime claims this month, to the ire of other claimants such as China and Malaysia. (Manila won an international arbitration case against Beijing in 2016, which China boycotted.) Many of the islands in the South China Sea have multiple claimants; the region was historically more the domain of pirates than states.

The conflict between China and the Philippines has been simmering for years, and both sides have learned a relatively well-managed choreography that avoids actual conflict. But in a confrontation at sea, things could still go very wrong, very fast.

COVID tensions. While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s team of China hawks has drawn attention, his pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary could also prove harmful to the U.S. relationship with China. Kennedy has made false claims about the origins of COVID-19, in addition to spreading anti-vaccine falsehoods. (He published an entire book rehashing conspiracy theories about gain-of-function research.)

This is dangerous for two reasons. First, China is very sensitive to claims that it was responsible for the initial outbreak of COVID-19—whether well-sourced ones about the failure of local authorities in Wuhan or more dubious claims of a lab leak. China’s rupture with Australia in 2020 was sparked in part by Canberra’s calls for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Assertions such as Kennedy’s would cause justified anger among Chinese leaders.

Second, Chinese officials are prone to fuel conspiracy theories about U.S. bioweapons—both for propaganda purposes and because they sincerely believe them. Both sides have often fed into each other when it comes to conspiratorialism; claims repeated by a U.S. cabinet member would be given significant credence in China.

The COVID-19 pandemic did damage to biosafety cooperation between the United States and China. If Beijing believes that U.S. biowarfare plans are real, it could pour its own funding into the sector.

Telecoms hack concerns grow. A recent breach of U.S. telecommunications networks by Chinese hackers was bigger than first reported, with multiple providers confirming that they were targeted. The attackers secured political leaders’ communications and law enforcement data, but other organizations—likely including dissident groups and nongovernmental organizations working on China—may have also been compromised.

However, the surveillance activities may be a secondary concern compared with other Chinese-linked groups that have targeted U.S. infrastructure. To a degree, surveillance between rival superpowers is normalized; physical threats that target critical areas such as water and electricity are more alarming.

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