At 14:00 on Sunday, 2 September, 2018, a woman who had been walking through a park with a male companion in Hangzhou City was the victim of a violent and extreme stabbing. Witnesses say she was stabbed over 40 times, as a result dying on the spot. Multiple witnesses were present at the scene.
One witness, Jiang, claimed to be playing poker with her friends in the park when she spotted the couple walking towards the fitness area. Jiang remembered thinking nothing of the pair as they walked, saying they looked like a normal couple.
The couple were said to have quarrelled in the fitness area of the park at which point the man produced a knife. Witnesses claim the man stabbed the woman 40 to 50 times, mainly injuring her head and shoulders.
After the woman fell to the ground the man continued his stabbing frenzy. Covered in blood and still holding the knife, the man was arrested soon after police arrived on the scene.
Witnesses claim people shouted at the man to stop, but to no avail, as he kept shouting incoherent sentences and hacking the woman as she laid on the ground.
Elsewhere in China, a 30-year-old male surnamed Zhang from Baisheng in Jiangsu’s eastern Zhenjiang city was finally arrested after a “thrilling” chase; 7 people were injured.
At 18:13 on 20 August, 2018, the Zhenjiang Public Security Bureau were alarmed that there was a man brandishing a knife on the road.
Officers from the Runzhou branch quickly arrived on the scene and after speaking with various witnesses, soon found Zhang’s escape route.
At 18:28, officers located Zhang, who was riding an electric bike traveling west to east along Nanshan Lu. When officers indicated for him to pull over, Zhang abandoned his vehicle and fled, stabbing a woman along the way and stealing her car battery.
After officers finally caught up with the man, restraining him proved difficult as the focus was to disarm him. Zhang was finally arrested and taken to the hospital for treatment for his own injuries. It was revealed later that a total of seven people; three men and four women, were injured by Zhang’s kitchen knife, none life-threatening.
According to Zhang’s parents, he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and does not regularly take his medication. The case remains under further investigation.
While larger attacks, such as the kindergarten attack of 2017 that killed 11, or the Kunming train station attack of 2014 that killed 35, are rare, smaller stabbing attacks in China appear to be becoming more commonplace, with incidents such as these rising in local news reports. In July, in our own Nanjing, a Pakistani student, 26-year-old Moiz Uddin, was stabbed multiple times and died shortly after.
“Correspondents say the attacks are unsettling in a country where such violent incidents are rare. Some analysts have suggested that an increase in psychiatric illnesses brought about by rapid social change is behind the attacks”, reports the BBC on the subject.
