Eight people have been killed and 17 injured in a mass stabbing at a college in China, days after the country’s deadliest attack in a decade.
A former student, 21, was said by police to be angry about failing an exam and not getting his graduation certificate, prompting the deadly rampage at the vocational college.
He was arrested at the scene at the Wuxi Vocational College of Arts and Technology in the eastern province of Jiansu and confessed, police said.
The Yixing Public Security Bureau said in a statement that according to preliminary investigations, the suspect was also dissatisfied with his internship compensation’.
Yesterday’s attack came days after a man rammed his car into a crowd outside a sports stadium in Zhuhai, killing 35 people and injuring 43 on Monday night.
The suspected attacker, 62, was reportedly angry at the terms of a divorce settlement, police in the southern Chinese city said.
Wuxi Vocational College offers courses to prepare students to work in industries, such as cable manufacturing, interior design, and marketing, its website says.
The junior college and others like it are part of a drive to direct more young people into job-specific training, but that movement has been held back by the stigma attached to vocational colleges compared to academia, analysts say.
The killings sparked a rare and heavily censored online discussion over mental health in China, and whether young people will find themselves worse off than generations before them as the world’s second-largest economy slows.
At least six other high-profile knife attacks have been recorded this year across China.
Qu Weiguo, a Fudan University professor, said the recent cases of ‘indiscriminate revenge against society’ in China had some common features: disadvantaged suspects, many with mental health issues, who believed that they had been treated unfairly and who felt they had no other way to be heard.
‘It is important to establish a social safety net and a psychological counselling mechanism, but in order to minimise such cases, the most effective way is to open public channels that can monitor and expose the use of power,’ Qu posted on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
The short essay had been removed by the censors by Sunday afternoon.
Trending online discussion topics over the past year have put a focus on the diminished optimism in China about a turnaround for jobs, income and opportunity. One of those – ‘the garbage time of history’ – took off in the summer as a shorthand for economic despair.
In recent weeks, Chinese officials have rolled out a raft of stimulus measures to revive the economy. Monday’s car attack also prompted an intervention by President Xi Jinping, who urged local police to ‘strengthen their control of risks’ by identifying people at risk of lashing out.
One online commentator said the Wuxi attack appeared to reflect a sense of entitlement for a generation that had not expected hardship, a ‘giant baby mentality’.
‘Always thinking that they are so aggrieved: “Everyone is persecuting me, I study and struggle just to be a beast of burden”,’ the person wrote on Weibo on Sunday.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE : Rock from 4,200,000,000 years ago confirms something we wondered about the moon
MORE : Dozens killed and multiple injured after car hits crowd outside stadium
MORE : Boeing plane engine catches fire after taking off from airport
Get your need-to-know
latest news, feel-good stories, analysis and more
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.