A prevailing mood of hostility and violence has been observed in Chinese society recently.
On March 10, in Handan, Hebei Province, three teenagers killed a classmate, buried his body, and returned to school the next day and resumed their classes as normal. This meticulously planned murder carried out with such brutal tactics, sends shivers down one’s spine.
In a single day on March 19, four serious traffic accidents occurred, with two of them being cases of drivers crashing into pedestrians, at least one of which is suspected to be a case of someone with a grievance taking revenge on society.
Teen Murder Case Shocks Nation
Independent TV producer Li Jun said on the “Pinnacle View” program that the murder case of the three minors in Handan City sent shockwaves across the country that, in his view, surpassed that of the chained woman and missing teen Hu Xinyu.The “chained woman” is a mother of eight locked in a village hut with a chain around her neck, who is likely a victim of human trafficking and forced marriage, while Hu Xinyu was a 15-year-old student who went missing from his school dormitory in October 2022, with many suspecting that he had become of victim of organ harvesting.
“Three 13-year-old students conspired to kill one of their classmates in order to rob him of two to three hundred yuan ($27-$41) that could be transferred on his cell phone. They first dug a pit in a shed, that is, a pit to bury the body, and then one person called the classmate over. When they committed the crime, they clearly divided the task among themselves: one person beat the victim to death with a shovel, the second person buried him, while the third person guarded outside to make sure that no one was around or approaching the shed. After the murder, these three people went to class the next day as usual. Three 13-year-olds so calmly planned to kill another 13-year-old and then methodically executed the plan. This level of cruelty and callousness is beyond my imagination,” Mr. Li said.
“What is the state of mind of these children? I would like to know what kind of social environment, what kind of family upbringing, and what kind of schooling created these three people with such a devil-like personality trait?” he asked. “Many parents were shocked when they read about this case. Some parents said, ‘In the past, we told our children to reason with bullies, but in the future, should I teach my children to proactively hit and maim the bullies? I would rather go to jail to visit my child than cry at his grave.’ These are the real words of some parents left on social media when discussing this murder case. From these words, we can see how desperate they are!”
Mr. Li believes that this kind of tragedy is related to the hate and violence indoctrination by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from childhood.
“Children have no judgment. When a child is indoctrinated with hate education, he will have violent tendencies and may display all kinds of extreme behaviors. In addition, when Chinese children have such a tendency to violence or bullying, the school does not care. In fact, these three children often bully the victim boy, not for a day or two, but for a long time. According to various reports from the school and parents, the school authority does not care about these things and even wants to cover up the bullying. Under these circumstances, the children’s violent behavior is encouraged. They think that there is no punishment even when I beat him up like this, so next time I can rob his money in a more violent way,” Mr. Li analyzed.
He pointed out that in the United States when a child shows tendencies toward violence, schools treat it as a serious matter.
“In the school my child attended, when a student had a conflict with another student, he got angry and said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ The school immediately took it seriously and conducted numerous counseling sessions with this student to understand why he made that remark and what his feelings were. They also communicated with his parents and looked into his family background and home environment. With these efforts, at least they can let the child know, ‘Oh, this kind of thinking is not right, I can’t have such a radical idea.’ This will help to defuse the situation to a large extent,” Mr. Li said.
Chen Chuangchuang, a practicing attorney in the United States and Executive Director of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of China, said on “Pinnacle View” that the three underage students went to school, as usual, the next day, indicating that they did not understand the severity of their actions.
High Stress and Hostility Among Young People
Shi Shan, an expert on China issues and senior editor at The Epoch Times, shared on “Pinnacle View” that as young people face high stress and develop a hostile mentality, Chinese society enters a dangerous period.“One of the problems facing all of Chinese society at this time is that the atmosphere of violence is suddenly on the rise. In addition to the Handan case, there have been many other social order cases, including four traffic accidents in one day on March 19, which resulted in heavy casualties. Among these incidents, there’s evidence to suggest that at least one was an act of revenge by an individual harboring grievances against society,” Mr. Shi said.
Mr. Li added that on a single day on March 19, in several places, including Beijing, there were malicious acts of cars driving into pedestrian areas and hitting people. In Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, a student at a vocational school drove a car directly into a crowd, killing three people and injuring approximately 16 others.
“It was reported that he was unable to find a job, so he harbored hatred and impulsively sought revenge on society. A similar situation occurred in Beijing, where an individual drove into many people on a sidewalk and acted arrogantly and domineeringly after getting out of the car. It seems that the tendency of violence is increasingly growing in China,” Mr. Li said.
Mr. Shi further commented that when the economy is growing, especially when it is growing at a fast pace, a lot of social conflicts are covered up, but when the economy is in a downturn, all the conflicts come to the fore.
“In China, due to various problems in the economy and other issues, we can see that there are a lot of confrontations, which are becoming more and more frequent, and the whole society is beginning to enter a relatively dangerous period,” Mr. Shi said.
Mr. Chen agreed that young people tend to go to extremes when faced with high levels of stress because they are psychologically less mature.
Failure Will Lead China to Militarism
Guo Jun, president of the Hong Kong edition of The Epoch Times, said on “Pinnacle View” that this kind of violence and hostility are usually related to the economic downturn.She cited the latest official unemployment rate in China’s cities and towns, as announced by the CCP, as hovering around 5 percent, while the unemployment rate for young people is now 15 percent.
“Of course, people do not believe this figure, and some scholars believe that the unemployment rate of young people is nearly 50 percent,” Ms. Guo said. “Why is the youth unemployment rate so important? Because it is closely related to social stability, social structure, and social order. High unemployment rates among the youth typically lead to a worsening of public safety, and this is the case in every country. It is impossible for economic development to be smooth sailing all the time, and there are bound to be ups and downs. Especially when society has just reached a moderate level of prosperity and then falls back into a period of financial strain, the problems of public security and stability will be particularly acute.”
As a comparison, she talked about the Great Recession of the 1930s and how the U.S. government got out of it.
According to Ms. Guo, during the Great Depression, the United States experienced numerous social issues, with unemployment rates soaring as high as 40 percent. Consequently, there were significant problems with social security during this period, including the infamous American Mafia, which saw substantial growth and expansion.
“In fact, all developed countries went through a similar stage, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The economic growth of a country is not always smooth sailing. Whether it can weather periods of economic downturn is key to whether the country can become a developed nation. This is what we often refer to as the middle-income trap. China will be in this stage for the next decade, and I am not optimistic at all that it will be able to get through it,” Ms. Guo said.
What is the CCP doing to address the current economic crisis? Ms. Guo pointed out that as the government’s revenue is decreasing, the CCP is cutting the salaries of its civil servants and laying off staff, which is a wrong practice doomed to fail.
“Let’s take the United States as an example. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s approach was to increase the income of the lowest class of people, and he even used the country’s financial resources to invite the unemployed to chop wood on the National Mall. There were also major infrastructure projects and highway construction to increase the number of job opportunities, and he also set a minimum wage, increased welfare benefits, and so on. In other words, he did not protect the government in times of trouble, but rather protected the people with the lowest incomes. The CCP’s way of dealing with the decline in income is to increase fines, reduce the wages of grass-roots civil servants, and even lay off some government employees. The result is bound to be social conflicts that will worsen and intensify over time,” she said.
Moreover, Ms. Guo believes that the CCP regime will continue to strengthen its social control mechanism to ensure stability and transfer the task of maintaining stability to local governments.
“The end result will be terrible, and this is a failed path of national governance,” she said. “Another doom-to-fail path it may take is to resort to militarism when it can’t overcome the economic crisis. Before World War II, Germany and Japan took this path of militarism and began to expand externally to divert domestic pressure, leading to World War II. There are similar signs in China now. For example, the CCP has drastically increased its military spending and continues to provoke foreign countries. It is heading in a disastrous direction.”
