By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Violent Attacks in China

A series of violent attacks across China in recent months have pierced a tightly controlled society’s veneer of stability. In late September, a 37-year-old man killed three people and injured 15 others in a stabbing spree at a Shanghai supermarket. In October, a 50-year-old man injured five people in a knife attack in Beijing. Then, on November 11, a 62-year-old man drove into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai and killed 35 people and injured 43 others in what is thought to be one of China’s deadliest acts of criminal violence in decades. In the days that followed, a mass stabbing by a 21-year-old student killed eight and injured 17 at a vocational school in Wuxi, near Shanghai, and a car attack left several schoolchildren and parents injured outside an elementary school in northern Hunan Province.

There have been at least 20 such attacks in China this year, with a death toll of more than 90 people. Government officials have called these incidents “isolated” and offered explanations emphasizing individual motivations: the driver in the Zhuhai car attack was unhappy with his divorce settlement, for instance; the Wuxi attacker had failed his exams. But taken together, the attacks reveal deep and widespread ruptures in Chinese society fueled by economic stagnation, systemic inequality, and social immobility and exclusion. As a result, such incidents have come to be known as “revenge against society” attacks.

A comparative study published in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management in 2022 found that China accounted for 45 percent of the mass stabbings reported across the globe between 2004 and 2017. Its share can be attributed not only to the widespread availability of knives and strict gun control but also to sociopolitical tensions, including severe financial stress. Violent acts in China often target random victims in public spaces and are sometimes performative; in other words, the point is not to accomplish a specific goal but to draw societal attention. Although the state’s extensive censorship apparatus effectively stifles extended public discourse on mass attacks, the California-based nonprofit China Digital Times has documented surges in online activity after such incidents—indicating intense public interest—before posts are erased by censors.

The Chinese Communist Party’s strict controls have only exacerbated the problem. Violence underpins China’s social order, and revenge against society attacks should be understood in part as a response to structural violence perpetrated by the state itself, including the silencing of dissent, and other strategies for control such as the one-child policy. Public attacks are often reactions to repression; the irony is that the government generally responds to them with even more repression. After the attack in Zhuhai, for instance, local authorities swiftly imposed a reporting ban, forbade mourning in public, and sanitized the site. The state mobilized its legal and surveillance capacities in top-down enforcement of short-term stability, a hallmark of the CCP’s crisis management.

Such responses come at the expense of steps that would address the underlying problems inciting revenge against society attacks. If the CPP clings to a centralized, authoritarian style of governance, societal fractures are bound to intensify. Without systemic reforms to deal with these issues, China risks fostering a cycle of frustration and unrest that could increasingly erupt into violence and even threaten the country’s long-term stability.

 

Deep Roots

In recent years, China’s economy has struggled to fulfill the aspirations of an increasingly educated populace. There are projected to be more than 12 million new university graduates in 2025, a vast oversupply considering the country’s youth unemployment rate of 18.8 percent. (In reality, the rate is likely higher because the data excludes active students.) A dearth of meaningful employment opportunities has created limits on upward mobility. Grueling workloads and diminishing opportunities for advancement have taken a psychological toll on workers, especially younger ones. In response, many young people have embraced quiet defiance, including through the “lying flat” movement, which emerged in early 2020 and involves eschewing advanced careers (and even favoring blue-collar or gig work), adopting minimalist lifestyles, and renouncing traditional aspirations such as marriage or home or car ownership to protest social pressures that spur relentless competition and conformity. For others, the defiance has become louder. The researchers Ma Ziqi and Zhao Yunting have hypothesized that “social exclusion,” which can include feeling systemically barred from financial advancement or ostracized because of a socioeconomic position, is a driver of revenge against society attacks because such exclusion fosters isolation, resentment, and despair.

Economic stagnation only fans the flames. In China, increases in both GDP growth and wages are slowing, and the cost of housing and education are rising. These developments are driving financial insecurity among Chinese people, diminishing their hopes for a stable and prosperous future within the current system. The economic squeeze has also helped to exacerbate inequality. The richest one percent in China now controls more than 30 percent of the country’s wealth, whereas the bottom half of the population controls only six percent—a stark picture of resource polarization in a putatively communist country that values egalitarian outcomes and what the CCP calls “common prosperity.”

The legacy of state violence is also critical. China’s one-child policy, enforced from 1980 to 2016, disrupted family dynamics and relied on coercive, intrusive methods, including forced sterilizations and abortions. Although the policy achieved the goal of slowing population growth, one of the most significant threats to China’s economy today is the profound demographic imbalance that resulted: a vast number of aging retirees reliant on the state or their children for support, and too few people of prime working age. The state largely disregarded the longer-term human costs of the policy, including sustained inequality, deepened mistrust in the government, and the destabilization of societal cohesion and political order. Indeed, even after the government lifted the one-child policy, the birthrate continued its rapid decline, falling by half between 2016 (18.83 million births) and 2023 (9.02 million). This was due in part to the policy’s lasting socioeconomic effects: among other things, it both normalized small families and instilled a belief that having many—or any—children could derail a couple’s finances and careers.

One of the policy’s most devastating consequences is the plight of shidu (“bereavement”) parents, who have suffered the premature death of the only child allotted to them under the old system and cannot conceive another. Every year, more than 76,000 parents join this group, which faces particularly acute forms of marginalization. In traditional Chinese culture, children offer both emotional fulfillment and economic security for aging parents; they also confer social value, the absence of which can lead to ostracism. These problems are compounded by inadequate state support; aging parents who have lost an only child are eligible for a one-time state payment of around $4,600, a fraction of the financial support most parents would expect to receive from their offspring. Shidu parents embody the broader consequences of authoritarian governance, which by prioritizing control over welfare, fosters a systemic neglect that heightens social grievances and may ultimately contribute to the revenge against society phenomenon. A recent Chinese film documentary chronicled how the desperation of one shiducouple even pushed them to the brink of carrying out a public attack.

Structural inequalities have fueled a variety of demonstrations in recent years: shidu parents, for instance, protest annually in front of the headquarters of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in Beijing to demand that the state keep its promises of care and support; in 2022, people organized mass boycotts of mortgage payments to protest a housing crisis and “white paper” demonstrations against the strict measures imposed under China’s “zero COVID” policy. These outcries highlight growing discontent across diverse groups and, for many, represent a protest against decades of repression. For much of the Chinese public, the current state violence is a continuation of the more totalitarian repression suffered under Mao Zedong from the early 1950s through the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which ended with Mao’s death in 1976. People had no recourse during the brutal violence of that era, given the state’s total control of the country’s resources and narrative. Those days are long gone, but the legacy of that violence lives on.

 

Fool Me Once

Together, these forces have resulted in an accumulation of economic, social, and psychological stresses with little chance for release. And unaddressed grievances have helped create a climate in which people embrace violence out of desperation. The CCP’s oppressive governance only compounds the crisis. Responding to violent attacks or mass expressions of discontent, the party, in a thirst for control, has historically relied on a few main strategies that are only likely to intensify. Among the most central are enhanced surveillance and policing. China’s already extensive surveillance infrastructure—advanced facial recognition, social-credit scoring, AI-driven monitoring—is expanding further. New technologies such as the Crowd Emotion Detection and Early Warning Device system, which officials claim can analyze the behavior and emotions of large groups of people, could be used to help detect unrest, underlining the state’s efforts not only to respond to attacks but to preempt them altogether. Additional measures, such as an increased police presence near schools and in public spaces and heightened monitoring during politically sensitive periods, evoke the security models in regions such as Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has for years systemically repressed Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in what has become a de facto provincial police state.

As the sociologist Xueguang Zhou has noted, the CCP’s approach relies not just on mobilization but also propaganda, which dovetails with the party’s censorship and narrative management. The swift deletion of critical commentary on social media and the suppression of public discourse ensure that mass attacks are framed as isolated incidents rather than symptoms of deeper systemic failures. By controlling the narrative, the CCP seeks to prevent public outrage and copycat incidents while maintaining its image of authority. But these heavy-handed measures, in turn, perpetuate feelings of alienation and agitation among China’s people, increasing the risk of more attacks.

Wu Si, the former editor-in-chief of the history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, has said that “hidden rules” govern Chinese society—informal systems that are “neither ethical nor entirely legal” yet sustain the social structure. But the increasing frequency of revenge against society attacks suggests that the party’s indifference to certain rights and its squelching of dissent may be having an unintended effect: the rise of violence that may appear apolitical on its face but constitutes a desperate rejection of the political status quo. And if the party fails to expand economic opportunities and reduce structural inequalities and injustices, it may eventually find itself faced with greater challenges than revenge against societal attacks.

 

 

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