HONG KONG — Eight people were killed and 17 more were injured in a knife attack at a school in eastern
China
on Saturday evening, local police said, in the same week the country saw
its deadliest mass killing in almost a decade
.
The investigation is underway, along with the treatment of the injured, the Yixing Public Security Bureau said in a statement late Saturday night.
A 21-year-old suspect, surnamed Xu, was arrested at the scene in the eastern county of Yixing, Jiangsu. Xu had been a student at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology and carried out the attack “out of anger,” police said.
Xu didn’t receive his graduation certificate after failing an exam, the statement said, and he was also dissatisfied with his internship remuneration.
He confessed to the crime “candidly,” it said.
A
video circulating online
and geolocated by NBC News shows injured people lying on the ground with blood on their clothes and moaning.
Chinese censors were swift to suppress news of the death toll. In less than 30 minutes after police released the statement, the topic could not be found on the trending page of Weibo, China’s X-like platform, while a key word search only yielded limited results.
“It’s so horrifying. Why suppress the trending topic? It won’t change anything,” one user wrote. “It’s truly tragic for those innocent people.”
China will have a record number of 12.22 million university graduates in 2025, the country’s Ministry of Education projected on Thursday.
The world’s second-largest economy also faces a youth unemployment rate of about 17%. Chinese authorities stopped publishing youth jobless data in August 2023 after it hit a record high of 21.3%. In January 2024, they resumed publishing data after adjusting the statistical methodology, resulting in a lowered youth unemployment rate.
The incident is the latest in a spate of recent attacks in China.
On Monday evening, 35 people were killed and 43 more injured when a 62-year-old suspect rammed his car into a crowd outside a sports center in China’s southeastern city of Zhuhai. It is the deadliest mass killing the country has seen in almost a decade.
That incident
touched off a rare online discussion over the mental health of Chinese society and whether a string of recent high-profile attacks in other major cities could reflect deeper stresses as the nation’s economy slows.
In October, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China,
three people were killed and 15 others were injured
in a knife attack at a supermarket in Shanghai.
In September, a 10-year-old
Japanese boy was killed when he was stabbed
on his way to a Japanese school in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
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