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Fang
JIANTANG
The Zibo Kindergarten Attack
Classification: Mass murderer
Characteristics:
Kindergarten
attack - No motive has been established
Number of victims: 4
Date of murder: August 3, 2010
Date of arrest:
Same day
Date of birth: 1984
Victim profile: Three children and a
teacher
Method of murder: Stabbing
with knife
Location: Zibo city, Shandong province, China
Status:
Unknown. Probably executed
August 3, 2010 -
Zibo, China – Fang Jiantang – 4 Dead – 7 Injured
On 3 August 2010, 26-year-old Fang Jiantang (方建堂)
slashed more than 20 children and staff with a 60cm knife, killing 3
children and 1 teacher, at a kindergarten in Zibo, Shandong province.
Of the injured, 3 other children and 4 teachers were taken to the
hospital. After being caught Fang confessed to the crime; his motive
is not yet known
Man kills 3 children, 1 teacher in latest
in series of Chinese school attacks
By
Keith B. Richburg - The Washington Post
August 4, 2010.
A knife-wielding man
rampaged through a kindergarten in the eastern city of Zibo on Tuesday,
killing three children and a teacher, and wounding a dozen others in
the latest in a string of a strikingly similar attacks that have left
about 20 people dead, parents on edge and the country grappling for
answers.
The seemingly random attacks
have raised questions about the state of mental health treatment in
China, and the dislocation caused by two decades of explosive economic
growth and dynamic change that has left many bypassed on society's
margins.
The latest attack -- the sixth
since March -- followed the now-familiar pattern; the assailant,
identified as a man in his 20s, had no immediately known connection to
the kindergarten. He apparently mingled with parents waiting to pick
up their children about 4 p.m. before he began slashing victims with a
two-foot-long knife.
Some reports said the man fled
the scene but later turned himself in to police. In a brief dispatch,
Xinhua, the official state news agency, identified the attacker as
Fang Jiantang, 26. A local lawyer who lives in Zibo, in Shangdong
province, said the man was unemployed and lived about 100 yards from
where the attack occurred.
According to Zibo residents
reached by telephone, the attack occurred at the Boshan District
Experimental Kindergarten in the Golden Phoenix Compound, a facility
for government workers. A teacher at a nearby kindergarten said the
school that was attacked had 40 to 50 students attending, most of them
the children of local civil service workers.
Immediately after the attack,
the government, in a stated effort to head off copycat attacks,
imposed a news blackout, with few details filtering out through media
sources. The local police, government offices and the hospital in Zibo
all refused to give any details.
News of the Tuesday attack
only came out Wednesday, nearly 24 hours after the fact. Chinese media
Web sites during the day carried prominently displayed stories about a
workplace shooting in Connecticut that left nine people dead, but not
a word on the latest kindergarten attack here in China.
Even residents of Zibo said
they had difficulty finding out what happened. "News about the
kindergarten is blocked," said a teacher from a nearby kindergarten. "Last
night, the local news didn't cover the accident. This morning, the
head of our kindergarten had a meeting in the city to discuss enhanced
security. But no other news was released.
"I would be lying if I said
I'm not panicked," she said. "I worry a lot in my heart. But we have
two full-time security guards and two part-time security guards.
Besides that, our kindergarten has already installed advanced alarming
system and cameras. We have three locked gates to cross to enter our
kindergarten."
The director of the nearby
Golden Key Kindergarten, in the same district as the school that was
attacked, said, "The tragedy happened so suddenly. Parents are scared.
More than 100 kids in our kindergarten didn't come today. Their
parents dare not to put their kids in kindergarten now."
A local primary school in Zibo
posted a notice Wednesday saying all parents had to come into the
classroom to pick up their children, according to a local hairdresser
whose child attends the school.
*****
The school attacks have become
an embarrassment for China's ruling Communist Party, led by President
Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, who have made "social harmony" and
stability the catchphrase of their tenure. Hu and Wen have guided
China through expansive economic growth, and placed China on the
global stage with large-scale events like the 2008 Olympics and this
year's World Expo in Shanghai. But the ongoing spate of apparently
random school killings has shown that despite the progress, something
in China is seriously askew.
Some experts have blamed the
mental health system, which is still rudimentary here. China lacks
trained psychiatrists, psychologists and mental hospitals, and mental
illness carries a social stigma. Most people with mental illness
simply go untreated. Others said the killings pointed to a problem of
people feeling resentment toward society, because of perceived
economic unfairness or the pressure of authoritarian control, and they
are responding by lashing out, often at innocent victims.
Ma Ai, a professor of criminal
psychology at the China University of Politics and Law, called these
attacks, and other random incidents against adults that go largely
unnoticed, "the inevitable result of rapid social change in China." "It's
a matter of how to express their dissatisfaction," Ma said. "It's
easier to draw attention by attacking kids."
"In the past 30 years of
opening and reform, China attached more importance to economic
development and ignored fairness in society," Ma said. "When people
feel they are treated unfairly, they fight for themselves, no matter
in which way." Ma also said that in recent years, the government has
become more heavy-handed in maintaining "stability" and security, and
violence can be a backlash. "The authorities took simple measures to
keep the stability, like suppressing people," he said. "But in terms
of social psychology, when people feel pressure, they will push back
against the pressure being imposed on them."
4 Believed Dead in China School Attack
By Michael Wines - The New York Times
August 4, 2010
Three children and at least
one teacher were reported on Wednesday to have died in an afternoon
knife attack a day earlier at a kindergarten in eastern China, the
sixth in a string of school assaults this year that has stunned the
nation and sent government officials scrambling to suppress public
outrage.
The latest attack, in the city
of Zibo in Shandong Province, also was reported to have injured 11
other people, including two seriously wounded children, according to
accounts of the attack on Chinese Web sites. Police officers were said
to be uncertain of the number of attackers, but one, described as a
27-year-old man, was reported to have turned himself in.
Details of the incident were
sparse and sometimes conflicting. But postings on one blog stated that
the kindergarten, said to be in one of Zibo’s most affluent
communities, was limited to the children of local government officials.
That was later confirmed by Li Heping, a noted lawyer and defender of
human-rights activists in Beijing, who said in a telephone interview
that he had been in touch with a friend in Zibo.
As occurred after other recent
knifings, the government swiftly slapped a news blackout on the case,
blocking all accounts of the attacks on the Internet and banning all
photographs of the bloodshed.
Since March 23, when a man
fatally stabbed eight children outside a Fujian Province elementary
school, at least 18 children — all of kindergarten or primary-school
age — and 5 adults have died in the bizarre series of attacks.
Including preliminary reports from Tuesday’s assault, at least 66
other children have been wounded, including 5 who were clubbed with a
hammer by a man on April 30.
Most of the assaults have
occurred along China’s urbanized east coast, where wealth disparities
are most visible and social pressures presumably at their peak. The
government convened a panel of 22 experts in April to investigate the
attacks, and schools across China have installed surveillance cameras
and stepped up security.
A subtext to some of the
attacks appears to have been resentment of the rich or powerful. The
first attacker confessed that he acted in fury after being rejected by
his girlfriend’s wealthy parents, and targeted a primary school that
was attended mostly by children of the well-off.
But analysts have yet to find
a coherent theme to the assaults, aside from speculation by
criminologists and sociologists that some are so-called copycat
attacks and that they highlight the lack of adequate mental-health
care in a nation where psychiatrists are rare and mental hospitals are
often warehouses for the sick.
State-run media reacted to the
first attack last March with anger, grief and a series of articles
that sought to explain what could motivate such a horrific crime. But
as the attacks continued, censors clamped down on news coverage and
played up state efforts to combat violence and social upheaval.
The assault on Tuesday was not
reported until Wednesday morning Beijing time, and most traces of news
reports had been expunged from the Internet by mid-afternoon. Various
officials in Zibo, a city of about 670,000 some 230 miles south of
Beijing, declined to comment or said they did not know about the
attack when reached by telephone.
Reports of the Zibo attacks
offered varying tolls of the dead, the injured and the number of
assailants. The attack apparently took place about 4 p.m. Tuesday when,
as security guards at were on a break, up to three men entered the
suburban Boshan district experimental kindergarten and stabbed two
teachers, then turned on the children.
Internet accounts said the
school’s deputy director died, and some reports said that as many as
20 people had been slashed before the attacker or attackers fled. Two
teachers who sought to shield the children from the assault were
reported to be among those who were seriously wounded.
