# Any Cultural Relevance To The China School Killings?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [May 12, 2010, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169 "2010-05-12T14:31:28Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/21 "2010-05-13T09:28:18Z")
nm
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### Author:  [@ivan\_astikov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivan_astikov)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/22 "2010-05-13T09:35:55Z")
> [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](#):
>
> At the danger of hijacking the thread, this sort of thing does make you think about the slogan “Guns don’t kill people…” The real challenge, the tougher one, is to not allow people to develop murder in their hearts.
>
> Prince Philip said that if the UK outlawed swords, people would just kill each other with cricket mallets. He was being a bit trite, but there is some truth there.
It’s easier to disarm a man with a cricket bat and bad intent, than it is one with a Glock and the same.
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### Author:  [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/23 "2010-05-13T10:21:26Z")
Valid point.
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/24 "2010-05-13T10:37:43Z")
Furthermore, the perpetrator of the one and only [kindergarten massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre) that happened in the UK - with handguns - killed twice as many children as any of the Chinese crazies have managed yet.
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### Author:  [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/25 "2010-05-13T10:46:52Z")
Another good point, and I thank you for it.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/26 "2010-05-13T17:31:08Z")
[Some more details are coming out on yesterday’s attack.](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14china.html?hp) It turns out the killer did have a connection to the school: he was the landord of the building where the preschool met and was “having frequent disputes with the school administrator… over when the school would move out of the building.” So that may make this different from some of these other events. And apparently police in Hangzhou stopped a woman who “stormed” a youth center with a rusty knife in what sounds like another attempted copycat incident.
Thanks very much to our China-based posters for their thoughts on this issue.
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### Author:  [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/27 "2010-05-13T20:48:10Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> [Some more details are coming out on yesterday’s attack.](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14china.html?hp) It turns out the killer did have a connection to the school: he was the landord of the building where the preschool met and was “having frequent disputes with the school administrator… over when the school would move out of the building.” So that may make this different from some of these other events. And apparently police in Hangzhou stopped a woman who “stormed” a youth center with a rusty knife in what sounds like another attempted copycat incident.
>
> Thanks very much to our China-based posters for their thoughts on this issue.
Its still crazy. I mean, why not go after _only_ the administrator and NOT a bunch of little kids?
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### Author:  [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/28 "2010-05-13T20:51:48Z")
Ah, missed the edit window (again). From the article Marley posted, this was interesting:
\*The series of attacks, which began on March 23 when a man stabbed and killed eight schoolchildren, **have prompted calls by some writers and scholars for government officials to examine deeper problems within Chinese society, thus presenting a challenge to Chinese leaders.**
At least one provincial newspaper has said that censoring news reports and adding security to schools failed to address the fundamental problems.\*
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/29 "2010-05-13T21:01:42Z")
> [@FoieGrasIsEvil](#):
>
> Its still crazy. I mean, why not go after _only_ the administrator and NOT a bunch of little kids?
Obviously it’s still crazy, but it does make this attack different from the others. He didn’t go to a random school and start killing people at random. He went to a building he owned, which was run by someone he’d been fighting with, and killed the person he had a dispute with. Then he attacked a bunch of others. Why? Beats me. He snapped, and for whatever reason, this lease thing is waht made him snap. So he didn’t just kill the person he was arguing with, he attacked everyone else in there. (I think it was more or less a one-room school.)
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/30 "2010-05-13T21:49:46Z")
Does the shortage of young women play any role in this?
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### Author:  [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/31 "2010-05-13T23:41:29Z")
> [@acsenray](#):
>
> Does the shortage of young women play any role in this?
In my opinion, I don’t think it’s any more of a factor than the many other pressures that are troubling Chinese society right now.
I see a few things that are making life difficult for young people.
One is that material expectations are outpacing reality. Among my students, it’s all the rage to take driving lessons. Never mind that cars are an affectation (totally unnecessary in my compact, crowded city) that is just becoming possible for successful middle-age professionals. My education students- who are looking at making around $250 to $350 a month- seriously expect to be driving in the near future. This is kind of like American education students thinking they are going to be getting their Lexus in the next couple of years. These failed expectations cause a lot of frustration. And I can only imagine how frustrated the really truly poor must be as the gap between rich and poor widens.
People expect to get married by 27. Not to get married would be a huge failure to yourself, your family and society, and basically if you don’t do it by 27 you are going to be left with few choices. But to get married, you need to own a house, which is usually paid for cash. Housing prices are rising like crazy- a friend of mine just bought an apartment in my unhip backwoods city for $60,000 USD. So people need to come up with these huge wads of cash in their early 20s, and the jobs for that just aren’t there. People are going to college thinking they’ve been promised an easy life, but then they find the jobs aren’t there for them, and they feel like they’ve basically only got this one shot at happiness.
Furthermore, life is still quite rigid. Few of my students actually chose their major, and there is no real opportunity to change majors. Nor are there usually opportunities to change professions. What you begin in your early 20s is basically what you expect to be doing for life. Usually it’s not really possible to go back to school or retrain or start again. So people feel locked in to what may be unsatisfactory situation.
Finally, I sense a lot of isolation. In my experience, Chinese society does not have a huge tradition of going out and meeting strangers the way we might at a party or a class. It seems to me that traditionally your social groups are fairly rigid- your classmates, your workmates, etc. However, as society changes and people begin to move around more, these traditional social groups are failing some people. People are falling through the cracks, with no real way to get back into a social group.
I have some students who, because they transfered to a different class or something, report that they do not have a single friend and feel like they have no way to make one. Actually, I hear this a lot. In a communal society, where people largely define themselves according to their relationships, this can be devastating. Likewise, I think romantic relationships can take on a bigger a meaning and breakups can be a lot harder, in part because people often define themselves in terms of other people.
Anyway, I’ll give some disclaimers- this is just my opinion. I don’t know everything about China and my experiences are fairly centered around small-town Sichuan province, etc.
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### Author:  [@kidneyfailure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kidneyfailure)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2010, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/32 "2010-05-13T23:44:55Z")
> [@acsenray](#):
>
> Does the shortage of young women play any role in this?
One of the killers said he’d gone on a rampage because he’d been spurned by a woman he wanted to marry, but they made it sound more like a class thing (she was from a good family, he wasn’t or something). This most recent guy on Wednesday had two kids, I think. I doubt it has anything to do with demographics…probably just a bunch of psychos who finally snapped.
ETA: Combine what **even sven** said above about various social pressures with the fact that, as mentioned before, many Chinese have untreated mental illnesses and, well, you’ve got a bad situation just waiting to get worse, unfortunately.
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### Author:  [@Marmite\_Lover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marmite_Lover)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2010, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/33 "2010-05-14T20:34:58Z")
> [@kidneyfailure](#):
>
> Well, it seems like most of those school shootings are done by students from the school or other teenagers (Kip Kinkel, Eric & Dylan, etc etc). These are just random psychos without any discernible connection to the students and schools they attack.
The guy in Hanzhong had rented out his house to make a kindergarten. The teachers argued over the rent to pay. He wanted his property back, they argued, he went berserk. He knew all of the children and teachers. There was a connection to the school and children.
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### Author:  [@kidneyfailure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kidneyfailure)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/34 "2010-05-15T00:19:31Z")
> [@Marmite\_Lover](#):
>
> The guy in Hanzhong had rented out his house to make a kindergarten. The teachers argued over the rent to pay. He wanted his property back, they argued, he went berserk. He knew all of the children and teachers. There was a connection to the school and children.
Uh, yeah, I know. In fact, I even mentioned it in this thread:
> [@kidneyfailure](#):
>
> this most recent one seems to have had some other issues involved (the murderer rented his property to one of the victims, I guess)
I think, though, that this guy was the only one of these recent attackers that had a connection to the place he attacked. I could be wrong, though. We wont know unless the cops release more info about each case.
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### Author:  [@Kevbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kevbo)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/35 "2010-05-15T02:15:54Z")
I’m getting this from discussions with a Taiwanese colleague.(TC)
I’m in my mid-40s, unmarried, no kids, and no interest in having them. This caused a great morbid curiosity in TC…I think to a similar degree I feel about a different former colleague who underwent M2F gender reassignment surgery. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but it is so far outside my personal experience that I really can’t empathize at all.
TC’s two boys were a source of great pride to him. As he explained it, carrying on the bloodline was a debt he owed to all the generations who came before. Not to do so would extremely disrespectful, and make him a source of great disappointment to his parents. In addition, his children are the the Chinese version of a 401K.
To address the OP, killing children is about the most serious way you could lash out at Chinese society.
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### Author:  [@kidneyfailure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kidneyfailure)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/36 "2010-05-15T02:39:06Z")
I should think it would be the most serious way to lash out at any society, wouldn’t it?
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### Author:  [@ivan\_astikov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivan_astikov)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/37 "2010-05-15T11:18:06Z")
No, a gang of nuns taking a group of pensioners on a trip round a petting zoo, would be a far more potent statement.
Oops! Sorry, thought we were still in the Pit.
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### Author:  [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/38 "2010-05-15T22:28:48Z")
> [@kidneyfailure](#):
>
> Well, it seems like most of those school shootings are done by students from the school or other teenagers (Kip Kinkel, Eric & Dylan, etc etc). These are just random psychos without any discernible connection to the students and schools they attack.
They are _now_, but the worst school massacre in the US was carried out by an adult in 1927: [Bath school massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster). All of the earlier incidents of multiple murder in US Elementary school history were [carried out by adults](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school-related_attacks#Primary_school_incidents) too, and in fact it wasn’t until the 1970s where anyone even as young as age 14 killed more than one person in their school.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2010, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/39 "2010-05-15T23:33:38Z")
> [@elfkin477](#):
>
> They are _now_, but the worst school massacre in the US was carried out by an adult in 1927: [Bath school massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster). All of the earlier incidents of multiple murder in US Elementary school history were [carried out by adults](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school-related_attacks#Primary_school_incidents) too, and in fact it wasn’t until the 1970s where anyone even as young as age 14 killed more than one person in their school.
Worth mentioning–the Bath School bombing also featured the earliest documented case of a deliberate car bombing I know of.
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### Author:  [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2010, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-cultural-relevance-to-the-china-school-killings/539169/40 "2010-05-22T03:58:55Z")
Just a bunch of psychotics who need to be killed or put in nuthouses, nothing cultural.
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