A string of mass attacks that occurred across China recently has raised concerns about how people deal with the frustration under the tight control of the CCP.
China has executed a man who killed at least 35 people in a car attack outside a sports center in November 2024, in one of a series of mass attacks recently that have heightened public concerns.
Fan Weiqiu, 62, was
convicted in December 2024 of endangering public safety through dangerous methods, five weeks after driving an SUV into a crowd exercising outside a sports stadium in Zhuhai in southern China.
Fan received the death penalty from an intermediate court in Zhuhai. Following approval from China’s top court, his execution was carried out on Jan. 20, state media Xinhua reported.
Local authorities attributed Fan’s motive to
anger stemming from “a broken marriage, personal frustrations, and dissatisfaction with the way financial assets were divided during his divorce.” When arrested at the scene, Fan had severe wounds to his neck and other parts of his body that appeared to be the result of self-harm, Zhuhai police
said at the time.
On the same day, Chinese authorities executed a second man, Xu Jiajin, a 21-year-old man who was sentenced to death in December 2024 for intentional homicide.
Xu allegedly attacked people at his university because he was unable to obtain a graduation certificate after failing his examinations and was dissatisfied with his internship payment, local police
said at the time, citing the initial investigation results.
The Wuxi attack happened just a day after the Zhuhai incident and was followed by a string of
tragic events across the country last year.
Outside observers have raised concerns about the recent wave of deadly incidents, highlighting a growing sense of desperation under the tight control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and amid an economic downturn.
“The Chinese economy has completely collapsed,” Hu Lirun, a businessman from Shanghai, previously
told The Epoch Times “The corruption within the entire system over the years, and the exploitation of the people by the bureaucracy, have led to widespread misery. Everyone feels there is no way out.”
Hu said companies either have collapsed or are deeply in debt, with some businesspeople he knows having already fled abroad.
“Now that the country has reached this point, everyone is experiencing tremendous panic, so we are in a vicious cycle,” Hu said. “The word ‘collapsing’ is very fitting to describe the current state of society. That’s why such malicious incidents have started to explode.”
State Secrecy
On China’s tightly controlled social media platforms, the two men’s executions sparked widespread discussion on Jan. 20, with related hashtags jumping to the top of the trending topic list on Weibo, China’s equivalent of X. Many Chinese netizens applauded their death.China is
believed to execute more individuals than any other country annually, with Amnesty International calling it the “
world’s lead executioner” in a 2024 report.
The precise number of executions remains unknown because the CCP considers such information a state secret.
In
2005, senior Chinese health officials acknowledged that it procured organs from
executed prisoners for transplant, a practice that Beijing had previously denied.
In 2015, amid growing scrutiny of its
booming organ transplant industry—where vital organs were allegedly obtained on demand within just a
few days—the regime claimed to have ceased the practice and established a voluntary donor system.
Medical professionals have long disputed the regime’s claims, citing questions about the
authenticity of official organ donation data. In 2019, the London-based China Tribunal
concluded that the CCP had forcibly removed organs from living prisoners of conscience for years, with the primary victims being detained Falun Gong practitioners.
