A man drove a car into a group of people near an elementary school in central China on Tuesday, injuring multiple students, in what appeared to be the third large-scale attack in the country in a little over a week.
None of the victims were in life-threatening condition, according to a statement by the police in Changde, the city in Hunan Province where the incident occurred. The driver, who the police said was 39 years old and surnamed Huang, was arrested.
Many Chinese were still reeling from two other recent tragedies: Last week, a man drove into a crowd at a sports center in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people, the deadliest attack in China in a decade. And on Saturday, a man went on a stabbing rampage at his former school, a vocational college in the eastern city of Wuxi, killing at least eight.
The spate of high-profile violence has raised fears about public safety and China’s lack of a social safety net, especially amid the country’s slowing economy. The authorities said Tuesday’s incident was still under investigation, but in the previous two attacks, the police had suggested that the perpetrators were unhappy with their financial situations.
Videos of the aftermath of the incident, shared on Chinese social media, showed young children in backpacks running, some screaming for help, while some people lay motionless on the ground. Another video showed a group of adults surrounding a man and kicking and beating him, near a white car; captions suggested the man was the driver.
But those videos quickly disappeared, as did early news reports about the incident. The Chinese government has nearly mastered its ability to censor information about disasters or other public safety incidents, preventing victims or their loved ones from describing their experiences and deleting eyewitness or media accounts that do not simply parrot the official explanation.
A search for a trending hashtag created soon after the incident occurred — “Crash at a school entrance in Hunan Changde” — yielded no results later in the afternoon. Instead, official media were using the hashtag “Changde crash perpetrator arrested.”
Public reactions to yet another eruption of violence, including calls from some social media users to implement reforms such as personal bankruptcy protection, also vanished.
The police statement did not specify how many people were injured. Earlier reports by government-controlled media had said that the crash occurred as students were entering the school in the morning, and that multiple students were injured, but those reports were deleted.
Reached by phone, a worker at a nearby mechanic shop, who gave only his surname, Huang, said that students usually lined up in front of the school’s gate in the morning before entering the school. He said the school had been closed after the attack.
On Tuesday, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s top prosecuting body, held a meeting promising to “maintain social stability” and to punish “major vicious crimes” “severely, strictly and quickly,” according to a statement. The statement mentioned the car attack in Zhuhai but did not refer to the Wuxi or Hunan incidents.
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