A man drove his SUV into a crowd of students and pedestrians outside a school in Changde, China, on Tuesday, causing numerous injuries but no reported fatalities.
Chinese officials have released few details about the incident but, if the crash was deliberate, it was China’s third mass-casualty vehicle attack in the past seven days.
Changde, a city with a population of about five million, is located in China’s southern Hunan province. The incident reportedly involved an unnamed 39-year-old male ramming his small white SUV into the gates of Yong’an Elementary School at around 8:00 a.m., just as students were arriving for their classes.
Local media reported the driver of the car was dragged out of his vehicle and pummeled by an angry mob of parents and school guards. Videos of the incident showed enraged pedestrians beating on the windshield of the SUV with sticks and snow shovels.
Police said the driver, identified only by his surname “Hung,” has been taken into custody and is under investigation. No definitive statement was made about whether the incident was a deliberate attack or an accident. Previous car attacks in China have racked up awful body counts, but in this case no fatalities have been reported as of Tuesday afternoon and only a few of the injuries were serious enough to require hospitalization.
“About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously, but luckily the ambulance came very quickly,” one of the parents told the BBC on Tuesday.
“Six or seven parents had forced the car of the person who hit others to stop. Even the security guard was knocked down. The guard is quite old, in his 70s or 80s, and couldn’t do much,” the eyewitness said.
As with other recent car attacks, Chinese social media quickly filled with photos and videos of injured people sprawled on the ground and frightened students running for safety.
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Chinese censors quickly deleted social media posts about last week’s horrifying car massacre in Zhuhai and even destroyed physical memorials erected to the victims, so they will probably take similar action to silence discussion of the Changde incident.
Chinese social media is buzzing with talk about the growing menace of individuals “taking revenge on society” by launching mass-casualty attacks with vehicles or knives against random bystanders. The Zhuhai mass murderer was reportedly upset about the division of property in his divorce, for example.
The BBC cited Chinese police records that charted 19 “incidents of indiscriminate violence” so far this year, with 63 people killed and 166 injured. Only 16 people were killed and 40 injured similar incidents last year.
“Why are such incidents happening more and more frequently lately, hit-and-runs, and always involving students? What has happened to society now?” one anguished user asked Tuesday on Weibo, China’s heavily censored X-like microblogging site.
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“These are symptoms of a society with a lot of pent-up grievances. Some people resort to giving up. Others, if they’re angry, want to take revenge,” Lynette Ong of the University of Toronto observed after the Zhuhai attack last week.
“Although these incidents are sporadic in nature, the increasing frequency at which they happen does suggest that more people in China are suffering from hardships and desperation that they have not previously experienced,” agreed Pitzer College professor Hanzhang Liu.
Fudan University professor Qu Weigo said one of the problems is that China lacks healthy avenues for people to express their anger or frustration. Everyone fears retaliation by the state, so they keep their feelings bottled up until they explode.
“It is important to establish a social safety net and a psychological counseling mechanism, but in order to minimize such cases, the most effective way is to open public channels that can monitor and expose the use of power,” Qu posted over the weekend on Weibo. His essay was deleted by censors in a matter of hours.