The fatal stabbing of two people by a man at a residential compound in southern China has ignited an online debate that has amplified during a summer scarred by a spree of similar crimes across the country.
Two days after those June 28 killings in the Guangxi region, national attention shifted to another stabbing incident, thousands of miles away – which was then followed by two others, also unrelated attacks in public places, taking the toll to seven dead in four provinces within two weeks.
The circumstances differed in each case; one perpetrator had been in a drunken argument, while another has a history of mental illness, according to police. All cases remain under investigation, and scant information has been released on the suspects or their motives.
The country of 1.4 billion has generally low violent crime rates and very tight gun controls. But China has been rocked by a number of high-profile stabbing cases in recent decades, including multiple such attacks at schools.
What stands out about the latest stabbings is the social media debate triggered by them, which experts say reflects a growing sense of anxiety and discontent that has spread across the nation in recent years as the country's economy struggles to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
China's economy, the world's second largest, has been plagued by myriad problems including a property crisis, weak spending, regulatory crackdowns and high youth unemployment – with economists fearing it could face years, if not decades, of stagnation.
These worries were clear on Chinese social media after the latest attacks, with several commentators connecting China's dire economic circumstances to the violence, even as the attackers' motives remained unclear.
"We should be nicer to others, especially given the economy is not doing well these past two years," one user wrote on the X-like platform Weibo. "Many people are struggling and their emotions are unstable."
Many others echoed this sentiment. "Try not to argue with people outside," another Weibo user wrote. "You never know if they are unhappy in life and can take it out on others."
Experts caution that these messages don't necessarily reflect the reality of those stabbings – authorities haven't released much information about the suspects besides their age and gender. We don't know anything about their personal lives or financial backgrounds and in some cases it's unclear whether their attackers knew their victims.
The stabbings this summer have garnered significant online attention, for example one related hashtag viewed more than 64 million times on Weibo. That's even as overall violent crime in China – already extremely low compared to many other countries – has been declining in recent years, according to state media reports.
Instead, it's possible the online speculation could mirror the public's own concerns as the economic slump drags on, said Michelle Miao, an associate law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
"Normally when people are reflecting on these issues, when they are making their own interpretations of social events, they are using this event … to reflect their own emotions, their own thinking … as a mirror of the current social reality," she told CNN.
Keep reading about the discussion around the recent attacks.
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