Beijing: A 10-year-old student was fatally stabbed near a Japanese school in southern China on Wednesday, according to the Japanese and Chinese foreign ministries, in what appeared to be the latest in a spate of knife attacks on foreigners in the country.
A 44-year-old man, surnamed Zhong, was in custody, according to a statement from the police in Shenzhen, the city where the attack occurred. The student was taken to a hospital, but died early Thursday of injuries sustained in the attack, the Japanese Embassy in China said.
Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese authorities specified the nationality of the victim, whose surname is Shen, according to the Shenzhen police. (The Chinese character Shen can also be used for surnames in Japan.)
But students at the Shenzhen Japanese School, near which the stabbing occurred, must be Japanese nationals, according to its website. And at a regularly scheduled news conference Wednesday, Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the government would continue to take “effective measures” to protect “the safety of all foreigners in China.”
A string of recent attacks has fueled fears that xenophobia and nationalism in China — which have been on the rise for years, often fanned by the government — are spilling over into violence. In June, four American teachers were stabbed in Jilin, a northern city; later that month, a Japanese woman and her child were attacked with a knife in Suzhou, a city in the east.
The Chinese government described each of those attacks as an isolated incident and said the assailants had not targeted citizens of any particular country. It insisted that the attacks could have happened anywhere in the world.
But soon after the Suzhou incident, several major social media platforms pledged to crack down on hate speech that targeted Japanese or incited “extreme nationalism.”
Japan’s consul general in Guangzhou, Yoshiko Kijima, who oversees a region that includes Shenzhen, told reporters Thursday that she had met with a Chinese official and requested that the “truth of the incident be revealed and explained,” referring to the assailant’s motive.
China’s ruling Communist Party has often encouraged nationalist emotions as a way of rallying support for its rule.
That is especially true when it comes to Japan. Imperial Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, which continued through the end of World War II, has shadowed the countries’ relationship ever since. And the stabbing Wednesday occurred on an especially sensitive date: The Communist Party regards Sept. 18, 1931, as the beginning of the invasion.
On that date, Japanese soldiers caused an explosion on a Japanese-owned railway in China, which Japan blamed on Chinese nationalists and used as a pretense for the invasion. Schoolchildren are taught to observe moments of silence on Sept. 18 every year. Trending social-media hashtags Wednesday included “Every Chinese must never forget Sept. 18.”
Japan’s foreign minister, Yoko Kamikawa, told reporters Thursday that the Japanese government had several days earlier requested that the Chinese authorities take “all possible measures” to protect Japanese schools on the anniversary.
“It is very unfortunate that this incident occurred in such a situation,” she said.
Even on other days, anti-Japanese rhetoric is common on Chinese social media, despite the platforms’ promise to crack down. Self-described patriots post videos of Japanese schools, asking why Japanese people are allowed to run educational facilities in China, or suggesting that the students inside are being trained as spies. Some videos have featured the Shenzhen Japanese School.
After the June attack, and again after the one on Wednesday, some commenters praised the assailant or suggested that Japan had staged the attack to win sympathy.
Other Japanese schools across China warned their students to be cautious. The Guangzhou Japanese School canceled club activities and asked parents to accompany their children to and from school for the rest of the week. It also advised parents to avoid speaking Japanese loudly in public.
In a first, the Japanese foreign ministry this year requested about $2.5 million in the government’s budget for the forthcoming year to hire security guards for school buses in China.
The Shenzhen Japanese School had 273 students as of April, according to its website. It is in a neighborhood where many Japanese people live. Shenzhen has about 3,600 Japanese residents, giving it the fifth-largest Japanese population in mainland China, according to Japan’s foreign ministry.
The stabbing in June in Suzhou was also near a Japanese school. A Chinese man attacked a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop outside the school. A Chinese woman, Hu Youping, who was working as a bus attendant, tried to shield the victims and was wounded herself. She later died of her injuries.
Two weeks before that, four instructors from an Iowa college who were teaching in Jilin in northern China were attacked by a Chinese man with a knife while walking in a park. The instructors have since returned to the United States. A Chinese bystander tried to intervene, according to an official Chinese official statement, which did not provide details.