Another Knife Attack on the Subway - Why Has Everyone Gone All Stabby?

It’s been a summer of stabbings in Beijing: Late Tuesday night a young woman was hacked down and hospitalized after being attacked by two muggers near Communication University.

Over the weekend an employee at the Sanlitun Jingkelong was knifed to death by a disgruntled co-worker, and it’s only been a few weeks since we reported about the stabbing at Joy City, which claimed the life of a young American woman, and another incident at Carrefour in which four people, including two children, were injured by a knife-wielding assailant.

The list in Beijing could go on and on, but unfortunately other Chinese cities are also reporting similar attacks, including an assault in Henan Province that happened just hours before last night’s incident in Beijing in which a middle-aged woman was stabbed to death by a man on the street, and an attack in Jiangsu in which a man attacked his elderly neighbor with a knife because he “coughed too much.”

In yet another widely reported case this summer, a desperate father in Guangxi stabbed two government workers to death and injured another four after he was told he could not register hukou for his fourth child.

All of this has spurred capital police to attempt to ban kitchen knife sales in supermarkets across the city – although you can still find knives for sale at many smaller shops and markets.

So just what, exactly, is going on? Why does it seem like everyone and their uncle has suddenly all stabby across the country? Although the police have stressed that none of these cases are related, it would appear that the whole country is in the grips of a stabbing epidemic.

But without a more comprehensive perspective it’s impossible to determine whether knife attacks are on the rise or simply that the media is simply reporting these incidents with more frequency in the wake of new communication platforms and social networks like Weibo and Weixin – after all, knife attacks in China certainly aren’t strictly a 2013 phenomenon.

Nevertheless there are some very alarming similarities and patterns of behavior in many of these crimes, which all-too often claim women, children and the elderly as victims, typically involve assailants who seem to be under some form of mental duress, and most often occur in crowded, public places.

Epidemic or not this disturbing string of assaults highlights a dire need for more comprehensive mental health care in China as well as more realistic measures to guarantee public safety. And as for the current “knife control” measures, not only are they ham-handed they seem to disregard the fact that most people’s homes are already filled with knives purchased long before any checks were in place.

How they will prevent any further attacks remains unclear, but what does seem clear is that Beijing’s longstanding reputation as a relatively “safe” big city is now on the wane.