China. The car drove into the crowd, another such attack. This is “revenge on society”

If you are experiencing emotional problems and would like advice or support, here you will find a list of organizations offering professional help. The National Emergency Service for Victims of Domestic Violence “Blue Line” operates at the telephone number 800-120-002. In a situation of immediate threat to life, call 997 or 112.

On Monday evening in the Chinese city of Zhuhai A 62-year-old driver named Fan drove his car into a crowd of peoplekilling 35 people and injuring 43 others. This is the bloodiest such attack in the world China for a decade, but another one in recent months.

This year, there have been at least several cases of cars ramming pedestrians in this country, and the number of other types of attacks on random people is also increasing. In February, on Chinese New Year, a lone attacker killed 21 people with knives and firearms in Shandong Province. In May, in Yunnan, a 40-year-old with a knife killed two people and injured over 20. In June Four Americans were stabbed in Jilinin September, a knifeman attacked random people in a supermarket in Shanghai. There were also attacks on children in schools and kindergartens – their number has been increasing for years, and many of the facilities resemble prisons, with high walls and concrete barriers at the entrance.

The list could go on for a long time, and this is most likely only the tip of the iceberg – we probably only know the loudest of the attacks, which were not silenced before they leaked through the tight Chinese censorship. Each time, the authorities assure that the attack is an “isolated incident”, but there are many indications that this is not entirely true. Because these attacks seem to have common causes, and the phenomenon has become so serious that it has its own name. They say it's “revenge on society.”

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Talking openly about social problems in China is impossible, but it is no secret that tensions are growing in Chinese society. Even the supreme leader personally commented on the attack in Zhuhai Xi Jinpingwhich happens very rarely. As assessed by the Financial Times, it was a manifestation of Beijing's determination in the face of “growing concerns about social stability during the economic slowdown.”

Because the reasons for the increasingly frequent attacks are seen in China's growing internal problems. Tens of millions of citizens feel economically and socially excluded, unable to find a good job or buy an apartment, or have no chance of finding a wife and starting a family. The latter is because the one-child policy prompted Chinese people condemned to have only children to carry out selective abortions on a mass scale, which is why today China is missing millions of women. Divisions are growing in Chinese society, and more and more citizens feel that they are cheated by the system.

And the reaction to these problems is, according to many, the growing phenomenon of “revenge on society”, in which lonely individuals release their frustrations by attacking random people. A driver from Zhuhai allegedly started ramming people due to his dissatisfaction with division of property after divorce. On Chinese-language social media cited by the BBC, many people expressed their sadness and lack of understanding towards the attacker. “How can you take revenge on society because your family life is failing? You have taken the lives of so many innocent people, will you ever be able to find peace again?” was one of the popular comments.

Many others, however, acknowledge that this attack is a manifestation of deeper social problems in China. “If there is a pervasive lack of job security and enormous pressure to survive… then society will certainly be full of problems, hostility and terror,” wrote one WeChat user. “We should investigate the sources of social factors that drive so many to indiscriminately attack the weak,” write Chinese netizens.

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Zhuhai, where the latest attack occurred, is a unique city in China. It did not exist 45 years ago – in this place there was only a group of sleepy, poor villages where they lived by fishing and smuggling to nearby Hong Kong. The establishment of the city here was announced in 1979, and a year later one of the first special economic zones in China was established there, which became the cornerstone of China's economic success in the following years. Today, Zhuhai is a state-of-the-art city full of bright skyscrapers and awe-inspiring infrastructure, inhabited by 2.5 million people.

Zhuhai is one of the symbols of Chinese power – considered one of the best places to live in the country, a city of great opportunities, and a constant setting for Chinese propaganda on social media. Now the fact that such a tragic attack took place there shows in an equally symbolic way the problems in Chinese society.

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