Several people were injured after a car drove into a crowd outside a primary school in southern China’s Hunan province.
State media said “several students and adults were injured and fell to the ground”, and several people were hospitalized, but a police statement later said there were no life-threatening injuries .
The driver of the vehicle – identified as a white SUV – was arrested by parents and school security guards and handed over to the police.
It was the third attack on a crowd in China in a week and raised concerns about public safety.
Mr Zhu, a parent of one of the children at the school, told the BBC: “About a dozen people were hit, some of them seriously injured, but luckily the ambulance arrived very quickly.”
He said he heard the attack as he was leaving the school grounds, after dropping off his 8-year-old child.
“Six or seven parents forced the car of the person who hit another person to stop. Even the security guard was knocked down. This guard is quite old, about 70 or 80 years old, and can’t do much,” he said.
The school was identified as Yong’an Primary School, Dingcheng District, Hunan Province.
Video from the scene posted on a private WeChat account showed some children lying on the ground, while others carrying schoolbags ran away in panic.
Another video taken shortly after the incident shows an angry pedestrian hitting the SUV with a snow shovel while the driver remained inside.
The driver is then seen exiting the other side of the vehicle, only to be surrounded by bystanders who begin beating him with sticks.
Similar attacks in recent days have sparked online discussions about the social phenomenon “revenge on society“, where individuals act out personal grievances by attacking strangers.
On Saturday, eight people were killed and 17 others injured in a knife attack at a vocational school in eastern China. Police said the suspect is a 21-year-old former student of the school who planned to graduate this year but failed the exam.
Previously, on November 12, at least 35 people died in car attack in southern Chinawhen a man ran into a group of people exercising on the sports track.
And in October, in Shanghai, a man killed three people and injured 15 others in a stabbing incident at a supermarket.
According to police records, this year there have been 19 cases of indiscriminate violence in China in which the victims did not know the perpetrators. 63 people were killed and 166 injured in these attacks. This is a sharp increase compared to previous years – for example, 16 people were killed and 40 injured in 2023.
Although incidents remain sporadic and rare, they are prominent. And the videos that often spread soon after on social networks made people worried and scared.
“These are symptoms of a society with a lot of pent-up grievances,” Lynette Ong, a prominent professor of Chinese politics at Canada’s University of Toronto, told AFP.
“Some people try to give up. Others, if they’re angry, want revenge.”
A slowing economy, high youth unemployment rates and a property crisis that is hurting savings have made Chinese people increasingly uncertain about the future.
Ong said that, in that situation, violent attacks are “the negative side of the same problem”.
President Xi Jinping ordered local officials to ensure the safety and “social stability” of the community and “strictly prevent extreme cases.”
Officials are keen to show they are acting quickly. They worry that such a high number of casualties in just one year could call into question China’s safety record, making people more wary and even discouraging travel.
The Communist Party has rapidly expanded its surveillance operations in recent years, and after last week’s car attack in Zhuhai, there were additional orders to deploy local officials and community workers to try to Try to prevent unrest.
