Seven children hacked to death at nursery school in China

By Malcolm Moore in the Daily Telegraph, May 12
Shanghai: Seven children at a nursery school in north western China have been hacked to death and at least 20 more injured in the ninth attack involving children in just over a month. The attack took place at eight o’clock in the morning in a kindergarten in Nanzheng county, near Hanzhong city, in Shaanxi province, according to Xinhua, the government news agency.  “The injured have been rushed to hospital,” said Liu Xiaoming, a local propaganda official, without giving further details.
The attack is the latest in a series of seemingly copycat knife attacks against young children. The spate of violence began at the end of March, when a mentally-unstable former doctor murdered eight children at a school in Fujian province.

That crime sparked further attacks across the country, mostly involving furiously frustrated middle-aged men. Zheng Minsheng, the 42-year-old who was executed for the attack in Fujian, said he had been prompted by “failures in his romantic life and in society,” according to Xinhua.

On April 29, a man locked the doors of a kindergarten class in Taixing, in Jiangsu province, and slashed at the children inside, wounding at least 28. The government has yet to reveal the number of children who may have died.

The following day, a man armed with a hammer attacked children in north east China before setting himself on fire.

Since then, the Chinese government has ordered intense security at all schools, redeploying thousands of troops and equipping security guards with restraining poles and pepper spray. In Beijing, the police say they have stopped seven more attempts on schools in the past month.

However, the extra security has so far been unable to protect children in the countryside, and parents have voiced their panic.

Zhu Li, a professor of sociology at Nanjing University, said the media was partly to blame for the copycat attacks. “Some people may not have considered stabbing school children, but because of the media coverage, they were inspired,” he said, to the China Daily newspaper.