Man with knife injures 22 kids at school in China

Man with knife injures 22 kids at school in China

4:15p.m. EST December 14, 2012

BEIJING (AP) — A knife-wielding man injured 22 children and one adult outside a primary school in central China as students were arriving for classes Friday, police said, the latest in a series of periodic rampage attacks at Chinese schools and kindergartens.

The attack in the Henan province village of Chengping happened shortly before 8 a.m., said a police officer from Guangshan county, where the village is located.

The attacker, 36-year-old villager Min Yingjun, is now in police custody, said the officer, who declined to give her name, as is customary among Chinese civil servants.

A Guangshan county hospital administrator said the man first attacked an elderly woman, then students, before being subdued by security guards who have been posted across China following a spate of school attacks in recent years. He said there were no deaths among the nine students admitted, although two badly injured children had been transferred to better-equipped hospitals outside the county.

A doctor at Guangshan's hospital of traditional Chinese medicine said that seven students had been admitted, but that none were seriously injured.

Neither the hospital administrator nor the doctor would give his name.

It was not clear how old the injured children were, but Chinese primary school pupils are generally 6-11 years old.

A notice posted on the Guangshan county government's website confirmed the number of injured and said an emergency response team had been set up to investigate the attacks.

No motive was given for the stabbings, which echo a string of similar assaults against schoolchildren in 2010 that killed nearly 20 and wounded more than 50. The most recent such attack took place in August, when a knife-wielding man broke into a middle school in the southern city of Nanchang and stabbed two students before fleeing.

Most of the attackers have been mentally disturbed men involved in personal disputes or unable to adjust to the rapid pace of social change in China, underscoring grave weaknesses in the antiquated Chinese medical system's ability to diagnose and treat psychiatric illness.

In one of the worst incidents, a man described as an unemployed, middle-aged doctor killed eight children with a knife in March 2010 to vent his anger over a thwarted romantic relationship.

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If a crazy person wants to hurt people, they will find a weapon or a way.

Chinese police suspect man who stabbed 23 kids 'influenced' by doomsday rumor

Just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre, a man stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school.

By Peter Ford | Christian Science Monitor – 1 hr 47 mins ago

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Chinese police said Monday that the man who stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school just hours before the Newtown massacre may have been “influenced” by doomsday predictions.
A belief that the Mayan calendar predicts an apocalypse this Friday, Dec. 21, has gained peculiar currency here. And the knifing spree is the darkest manifestation yet of how end of the world rumors have taken hold in China.

Doomsday rumors, generally light-hearted spoofs, have been especially widespread on the Chinese Internet since the success of the Hollywood blockbuster “2012.” That was the first major American film to portray the Chinese as “good guys,” builders of “arks” that offer salvation to some survivors of a cataclysmic flood. But Chinese authorities, nervous about threats to social stability, have been showing increasing signs of concern about the public's willingness to believe the rumors.

Police and government media are warning people not to be fooled by doomsday-related scams, alleged doomsday cultists have been arrested, and shoppers fearful of coming darkness have bought up all the candles they can find.

How much do you know about China? Take our quiz.

Police in Guangshan county, in the central Chinese province of Henan, said they were holding the suspect in Friday’s school stabbings, Min Yongjun, “for further investigation into his motives” and medical history, according to an announcement on the local government’s website.

The police “suspect” that Mr. Min “injured innocent people and children with a knife because he was influenced by doomsday rumors,” the statement added. None of the wounded children died of their injuries.

Chinese are susceptible to doomsday reports, suggests social psychologist Wei Zhizhong, because “scientific knowledge is still not widespread in China. People have abandoned their traditional mystical relationship with nature, but they are still exploring scientific ways of coexisting” with the natural world.

Lost in the transition, says Mr. Wei, a researcher at Wuhan University’s Psychological Research Institute, “some people respond to things like doomsday rumors.”

Last week the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, urged the government to “release timely, authoritative information to avoid some people taking doomsday jokes seriously, which may trigger irrational panic and chaos.”

The media “should not follow the trend of feeding doomsday emotion but should guide the public with rationality,” the paper suggested.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA
For some observers, though, the Chinese media are poorly placed to influence public opinion since censorship has undermined their authority.

“One reason that rumors prevail is because of the damaged credibility of traditional media,” wrote Liu Xiaocong, a TV producer, in an opinion piece for the English language edition of Global Times last week. “In countries where the media is regularly subject to restraints imposed from above … people lose faith in it and seize onto stories that haven’t been put through the official filters.”

The People’s Daily published its warning in the wake of reports that in two provinces, shoppers had cleaned local shops out of candles, spooked by reports that the world would be plunged into three days of darkness on Friday.

The Shanghai police issued a caution earlier this month on their Weibo account, similar to a Twitter feed, saying they had received 25 reports in a 24-hour period of people spreading doomsday rumors, apparently as some sort of scam.

“The police warn citizens that 'doomsday' is simply a rumor,” the Weibo post read.
Some are putting the rumors to political use, according to state-run media. The government is cracking down on a group that it says is urging a “decisive battle” against the “Red Dragon” Communist Party, according to the provincial Shaanxi Daily.

Members of the “Almighty God” group, which has been described as a cult by the state media, have been distributing leaflets announcing the end of the world this year, the paper said. Dozens of them have been arrested in different provincial cities, according to official statements.

http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-police-suspect-man-stabbed-23-kids-influenced-151816083.html