A society under stress, with mental health patients who go untreated

Two Sky Canaves stories in the WSJ.

Makes you realize that American who got killed at the Olympics by a mentally-ill knife-wielding Chinese was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two knife attacks in two days at Chinese schools (44 kids and 4 adults wounded!), following an equally bizarre attack in late March that left 8 kids dead.  Second story says a total of five attacks have unfolded in the past six weeks for a grand total of 11 dead and 70 injured.  Police fear the usual copy-catting effect.

But the attacks highlight a sense of growing social unease and the undeniable reality that most mentally-ill people in China are on their own.  Estimates run to almost 175 million, "and the vast majority of them have never received treatment," according to a Columbia U study.

Why go after kids?  In this upwardly mobile society, they are the ultimate status symbols.

You know how much American parents would freak out if similar events were happening here, and the Chinese are no different.  I know a lot of Chinese with the classic one kid to worry over, and the amount of attention that kid gets is stunning--even by obsessive US standards.  And if you cross them on the subject, they will get very mad--very fast, as we saw with the recent earthquakes.

So China orders police patrols, etc., but that alone won't calm parents when three-year-olds are being knifed in their school.

Again, the unease is larger than just these crimes.  It's a sense of accumulated ills amidst all this tumultuous development:

China's remarkable economic growth over the past three decades, while bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, has been accompanied by the emergence of complex problems that tend to undermine the ideals of a "harmonious society," which Beijing sees as necessary to maintaining the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Official corruption, rising income inequality and a frayed social-security system are among the most pressing issues, and now violent crime may be added to the mix.

"These attackers basically belong to the category of suicide attackers," says Ma Ai, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. "They can't expect that they can get away from police after they commit the crimes." To prevent future outbreaks of violence, Mr. Ma says it is necessary "to gradually eliminate the breeding grounds for their hatred toward society."

The motives for the attacks are confused. But the sense of rage toward society, and the way it is targeting children, has thrown a spotlight on the changes that have swept through China. Much has been made of the widening gap between the urban rich and the rural poor and the resentments engendered by corrupt and high-handed officials who hold sway over the lives of ordinary Chinese.

Beyond that, China's dash toward prosperity has placed huge psychological strains on those striving to stay ahead and on those unable to keep up. The mentally ill are among the most vulnerable members of a society that struggles to provide basic health care for large sections of the rural population.

China hasn't seen the kind of random street violence that blights urban life in some Western countries, but the school attacks point to a growing problem among individuals who nurse deep grievances against society and are ready to blow at any moment.

You have to go back to America's 1890s to find similar stress:  the previous 25 years following the Civil War were so stunning in their growth and discombobulation, and government services--corrupt as their were until civil service reform kicked in--simply failed to keep up with the growing needs.  Dealing with crime in major cities?  Hell, NYC didn't get the NYPD really going until the mid 1840s and it's not until the mid-1890s, when Teddy Roosevelt becomes a police commissioner, that you start to see the serious reforms begin.

My sense of the cops in China whenever I see them out and about is that they deal with numbers we can't begin to imagine.  They always look stressed and overworked and a bit behind events.  Far from impressing me as a police state, I find myself usually thinking that they should be more cops around--given the constant crowds everywhere you go.