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An unemployed man
entered a kindergarten in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province on Thursday
morning and stabbed 28 kindergarten students and three adults,
critically wounding at least five children, local authorities and state
news agencies reported.

It was the second mass stabbing of young students in two days, and the third in less than a month.

Many of the wounded
children were just 4 years old and shared the same classroom, according
to initial reports by the state-run Xinhua news agency. The adult
victims included two teachers and a security guard.

Police officers
identified the assailant as Xu Yuyuan, a 47-year-old former insurance
agent. According to Xinhua, he began attacking children with a knife
about eight inches long around 9 a.m. at the Zhongxin Kindergarten, a
middle-class school in Taixing, about 570 miles southeast of Beijing.

Little other information was immediately available. Taixing propaganda officials did not respond to telephone calls.

Thursday’s attack
occurred a day after a 33-year-old man in the southern province of
Guangdong stabbed 15 fourth-and fifth-graders at a primary school in
Leizhou. None of those students were seriously wounded. The authorities
said that attacker, identified as Chen Kangbing, had taught at nearby
school but had been on leave since 2006, apparently because of mental
illness.

On March 23, Zheng
Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian
Province, also on China’s east coast, as they waited with parents for
classes to begin. Some Chinese press reports stated that Zheng also had
mental problems, but most state media said no such evidence existed.

Mental illness
remains a closeted topic in modern China, and neither medication nor
modern psychiatric treatment are widely used. An analysis of mental
health issues in four Chinese provinces, published in June in the
British medical journal The Lancet estimated that 98 percent of the 173
million Chinese adults believed to suffer mental problems never
received professional help.

Those murders
created a nationwide sensation, stirring calls for a school safety
crackdown. Zheng was executed on Wednesday after what one legal expert,
the former Peking University law professor and civil rights advocate He
Weifang, said was an unusually speedy trial.

There was no
immediate explanation as to why the three attackers chose young
students as their targets. While assaults in schools are not
particularly common, an eerily similar series of five knife attacks
took place in August and September 2004 in schools and a child-care
centre. Three of the attacks occurred on China’s east coast.

In February 2008,
two students at another Leizhou school were stabbed to death by a
former student who then killed himself by jumping off the school
building.

In the current
string of knifing, which took place hundreds of miles apart, “probably
there was some kind of copycat element,” Liu Jianqing, a professor of
criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and
Law in Beijing, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People in
similar predicaments emulate this because of the impact of the mass
media these days.” The assaults likely were also acts of
self-destruction by the attackers, he said, because such crimes stand a
high chance of drawing a death sentence in Chinese courts.

Beyond mental
illness, some experts said that rising strains in China’s fast-changing
society may have a role in the growing number of violent crimes. Most
of the school assaults have occurred on the developed, urban east
coast, where both the cost of living and income inequality are high.

The man executed on
Wednesday, Zheng, wanted revenge on “rich” and “powerful officials” in
Nanping, where he lived, Xinhua quoted his neighbours as saying in a
recent lengthy article about the murders.

He selected the primary school where the slayings took place because it was the city’s finest, the article stated.

© 2010 New York Times News Service