HONG KONG — Chinese authorities scrambled Wednesday to quell public outrage over the country’s deadliest mass killing in a decade, as well as the delay in reporting it.
Flowers and other offerings were removed almost as soon as they were laid at a makeshift memorial in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, where 35 people were killed Monday evening when a car rammed into a crowd of people exercising outside a sports center.
The initial statement from authorities said the driver had been detained at the scene and that those who were injured had been taken to the hospital, and the incident was downplayed in Chinese state media. It wasn’t until almost 24 hours later, on Tuesday night, that authorities reported the death toll in the attack, which also injured 43 others.
Chinese state media reported that President Xi Jinping had ordered “all-out efforts” to treat the injured and that the perpetrator be “severely punished in accordance with the law.”
Amid a growing public outcry, discussion of the attack appeared to be suppressed on heavily censored Chinese social media platforms, with videos and other posts continuously deleted.
It is the latest in what appears to be a spike in violent crime in China, though it is difficult to know because there is no publicly available data.
In a country where there are limited avenues for expressing dissent, such attacks can be unnerving for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which prizes social stability perhaps more than anything else and may worry that they reflect the toll of an economic slowdown it is struggling to address.
The suspect in the Zhuhai attack, a 62-year-old man identified only by his surname of Fan, was said to be upset by the division of property after his divorce. He was in a coma after he harmed himself with a knife in his car, police said, and could not be questioned.
Lynette Ong, a distinguished professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, said it would not be surprising if local officials in Zhuhai were punished or removed from office, “because incidents like this are classified as destabilizing, a threat to social stability.”
She said the attacks were symptoms of a “pent-up society” that is more tightly controlled under Xi, who has increased online censorship and kept the country under strict “zero-Covid” measures for three years.
Combined with personal trauma and growing economic hardship, “people reach boiling point and they go out and commit something extraordinary, big violent crimes,” said Ong, who is also a senior fellow at the Asia Society.
The attack in Zhuhai, a city of 2.5 million, took place on the eve of a major air show that is held there every two years and where China debuted a new stealth fighter jet on Tuesday. There is no indication that the two events are connected.
But the sensitive timing of the attack may have been one reason for the delay in reporting the death toll, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies Chinese media and censorship. Local officials may have been waiting for directives from Beijing, he said.
Posts related to the attack appeared to be censored on Weibo, China’s X-like platform, where it ranked only 11th among trending topics as the death toll was reported on Tuesday. By Wednesday evening local time, it was not listed among trending topics at all.
Censorship is “very common” after such incidents, Fang said.
“The government wants to control the narrative and ensure that the public support for the regime won’t be affected,” he said.
Many commenters lamented the driver’s actions.
“Those who lash out at society are truly wicked. If you have a grudge, confront the person directly. Why harm innocent bystanders?” read one comment on Weibo.
While the identities of the victims in the Zhuhai attack have not been disclosed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that there were no foreign nationals among the casualties.
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