WTF is happening in China?

There have been five assaults on schoolchildren in the past two months. In the latest, a man with a butcher's cleaver killed seven kids and two teachers before killing himself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/asia/13china.html?WT.mc_id=WO-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-AMW-051210-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

 

This shit is nuts.

I've heard of copycat crimes, but what the hell would make you do this?

 

As I mentioned elsewhere, in order to buy a knife in China, you now need to show ID. They claim in their news reports that it has to do with the World Expo being in Shanghai, but I find that a bit silly.

There is a lot of issues dealing with those in the countryside and those in the city. The city is where all the money is. While those cities are expanding, it's going to take quite a while for the countryside to see much of it.

My best guess has to deal with frustrated individuals that see no end in their life looking to destroy the lives of others before they end their own.

The only positive is that these nutcases don't have guns at which to kill large amounts of people.

 

Children are hugely important in Chinese society, especially since the one-child policy. This is the ultimate anti-social act for them -- about as traumatic an act of violence as an individual could commit. It is, in a way, the ultimate freakout available to its borderline psychotic or psychologically broken individuals, and in a country with what, a billion and half people?, they've got more than a few of those.

 

I'm surprised that the official Chinese news agency even released this.

 

You think that they did? I've yet to see a story on it on CCTV News.

 

Makes me think of two things:

1) Saddam's information minister: "All is well."
2) One last burp from Soviet media in an interview with a man on the street when all hell was breaking loose outside the Kremlin in 1991 with the chant "Yeltsin! Yeltsin" Yeltsin": "What unrest? I see no unrest."

 

I blame the lack of prayer in Chinese public schools.

 

Meat cleavers don't kill people. Crazy Chinese guys with meat cleavers kill people.
I'm no mathematician, but I'm going on record as saying nine people in one rampage qualifies as a "large amount."

 

I saw a piece today on the eighth suicide at a Chinese iPod factory.

 

They're testing the iPods by downloading Judas Priest songs.

 

Now that's funny.