A 10-year-old student attending a Japanese school in southern China was attacked Wednesday and the suspect has been arrested, officials said.
The student was stabbed by a man surnamed Zhong about 200 meters (220 yards) from the gate of the Shenzhen Japanese School, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian said in a daily briefing.
The injured student was sent to the hospital immediately for treatment while the attacker was arrested on site. The case is still being further investigated,” Lin said.
The motive for the attack in the city of Shenzhen was not immediately clear.
In an email sent to Japanese citizens living in China, the Japanese Embassy warned residents to be vigilant and take precautions, citing knife attacks in recent months. The Japanese Consulate in Guangzhou, which is responsible for Shenzhen, called for measures to prevent such incidents.
On June 24th, a knife attack at a school bus stop at a Japanese school in the southeastern city of Suzhou killed a Chinese national who was trying to stop the attacker and injured a Japanese mother and her child.
Earlier in June, a Chinese man stabbed four U.S. university instructors at a public park in Jilin in the northeast, and a Chinese person tried to intervene. The four instructors from Cornell College were teaching at Beihua University. None was in critical condition.
The Chinese government described each of those attacks as an isolated incident and said the assailants had not targeted citizens of any particular country. It insisted that the attacks could have happened anywhere in the world.
But soon after the Suzhou incident, several major social media platforms pledged to crack down on hate speech that targeted Japanese or incited “extreme nationalism.”
China’s ruling Communist Party has often encouraged nationalist emotions as a way of rallying support for its rule.
That is especially true when it comes to Japan. Imperial Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s, which continued through the end of the Second World War, has shadowed the countries’ relationship ever since. The stabbing Wednesday occurred on an especially sensitive date: The Communist Party regards Sept. 18, 1931, as the beginning of the invasion.
