What’s Wrong with People?

I’m thinking of making the “What’s Wrong with People?” a regular feature here at The Waterglass.  In today’s What’s Wrong with People?, the story of a sick maniac who stabbed six kindergarteners to death in China:

Six kindergarteners and a teacher were stabbed to death and at least 20 other people were injured on Wednesday in an attack at a school in northern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.  The attack, which occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Shaanxi Province, was one of the deadliest in a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren by apparent lunatics wielding knives and hand tools.

Although official Chinese news organizations have been quick to release initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to diminish any suggestion of dysfunction within Chinese society. In presenting China as a “harmonious society” — the signature propaganda phrase of President Hu Jintao — the government often deletes dissonant reports from the Internet and other media platforms.  Some scholars have speculated that the attacks point to the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through significant economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is rapidly widening, and where corruption by local officials heightens frustrations among ordinary citizens.  Mental illness, too, is rarely acknowledged here, and thus treatment is in short supply.

The first of the recent wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, on China’s eastern coast. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 16 children and their teacher were attacked at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.

What’s wrong with people?