Walking past the neighborhood kindergarten on the way to work a week or two ago I noticed an unusual sign posted on the front gate, with a cluster of parents gathered around reading it. The sign was a notice informing parents of the recent school violence that has taken place across China, particularly at kindergartens. The message was clear – school might not be as safe as you once thought it was, but we’re going make sure your kids are protected. And so policemen appeared at the gates of both the kindergarten as well as the private high school where I work. They started checking our IDs and making sure no strange people were allowed to linger near the gate. Parents had to stay well away from the school when they came to pick up their children, who were ushered out one by one in an orderly line instead of in a mad rush of parents and kids. The gates of all schools and kindergartens are now equipped with security cameras ready to catch any suspicious activity so that police can rush in and protect children if needs be.

Photo: Praziquantel

School violence used to be the sort of thing that China could hold over the West saying look, our country may have problems, but we don’t have guns in our schools. Our kids go off to school without fear of being attacked, shot, or stabbed. China gets picked on a lot in the Western media, but the Chinese could always point to relatively low rates of violent crime (China’s murder rate, for instance, while not staggeringly low as it is in say, Japan, is much lower than that of the USA) to defend China’s liberal use of the death penalty or strong gun control laws. However, now these recent attacks cast doubt where previously there was none. Chinese parents now know what it feels like to send kids off to school and worry about whether or not someone, a person, not an unknown force like an earthquake or a tornado, but a violent horrible person will take their children’s lives. As a parent, the idea is chilling. I wish Chinese parents didn’t have to know, know in the way that the West has known for over a decade now, that this possibility existed.

The stories are all similar – the attacks have mostly taken place as students are being dropped off or picked up from school, and the attackers have used commonplace items like knives and hammers to attack school children. All in all, 17 children and adults have died and at least 50 have been injured in five different, yet similar attacks [Editor’s note: since this article was written there have been more attacks]. The Chinese media has called the later attacks copycats, and it is hard not to concede the point because otherwise the coincidence just seems too great. However, despite the fear of copycat attack, the news was downplayed, but not suppressed, and the school attacks were what everyone was talking about at work. I got updates about the attacks on my Chinese news ticker and, of course, there was that fateful notice posted outside of the kindergarten.

When the first big school shooting happened in America, at Columbine, I was about 18 years old and the same age as many of the victims. Columbine sparked, and still sparks, big debates about issues ranging from gun control to bullying to violence in the media. Everyone seemed intent on figuring out “why” Columbine happened, and similarly, most stories in the Western media regarding these attacks on Chinese schools have focused on social issues – what could have caused such a massive coincidence? Surely the reasons must be social? And so hot issues are bandied about – corruption, mental health services, unemployment, social unrest – all trying to figure out exactly why these attacks took place. Reactions from officials, like the security cameras put in place at school gates, bring to mind metal detectors installed at American schools in the wake of Columbine. This is the sort of tragedy that begs for answers and grieving families and a grieving society all want to know why their child was a victim, what could have been done and what should have been done to prevent this.

It is true that there are social problems in China that might explain, at least in part, why 5 attacks on schoolchildren could take place. At least one of the attacks was motivated by a dispute between the attacker and the administrator of the kindergarten where the attack occurred, and another attack was perpetrated by a former teacher at the kindergarten that was attacked, prompting speculation about the pressure to succeed in modern day Chinese society and the toll unemployment takes on one’s psyche. Several of the attackers were also obviously mentally unbalanced, and it is true that mental health services in China are severely lacking and that mentall illness here does, more often than not, go untreated. Is it possible that with better access to mental health services these people would not have gone on the rampages that they did? It is possible.

And yet, undeniably, these sorts of things also happen in places that are not China, and whenever they do, we search for answers but, it seems that we almost always come up with nothing but more questions, and the answers we do get are often unsatisfactory when they seem to draw some sort of logical or reasonable conclusions about acts that, for most, defy reason. While it seems like there might be some comfort for parents who lost a child in knowing why they lost that child, when it comes down to it there is no satisfactory reason for such a loss. And so, analyses and editorials often come off as cold and heartless, and while it is tempting to cast blame on Chinese society, or some defect in the system, my heart, my mother’s heart, says “yes, but they were just babies.” There is no defect in the system that should make such a thing possible. I think about my son, who will be going off to kindergarten in September, and I know that I’d like to think that no matter whether he was attending kindergarten in America or China or Nigeria, that he’d be safe because our children should be safe, they should not have to worry about being stabbed or shot or beaten, no matter where they are. And when they are not safe it is a failing not of any one system or any one country or policy, it is a failing of humanity.
 

Related Links
Where to Send Your Child for School in China
The Worst of the Worst: China's Most Infamous Criminals
I Want To Raise My Family in China – Am I Crazy?

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