The value of life has dropped.

What the heck is going on in China? That uber-urban living* seems soul-stealing to me, and personally, I think the whole idea of abortion-on-demand devalues how a society values all life. (ie/ You tend to find more young women turning up dead in plastic bags in places where abortions are seen as nothing more than a popular birth control method, imo. Coincidence? Maybe so, maybe not.)

Regardless, the recent attacks on schoolchildren -- WWI-type close proximity deaths, not even the impersonal distance of a bullet range -- make you wonder what exactly is going on over there:

BEIJING — A man with a kitchen cleaver rampaged through a kindergarten in rural northern China on Wednesday, and state media said he hacked to death seven children and two adults before returning home and killing himself.

The attack, the deadliest of five assaults on Chinese schoolchildren in the last two months, immediately prompted some writers and scholars to call for government officials to examine the pressures in society that may have led to the mass killings and to stop what they called government efforts to limit more extensive coverage of the violence.

Leave those kids alone!

At least 17 people have been killed — mostly children — and dozens injured in the series of attacks, which began in March. In each case, a middle-aged man acting alone set upon children with knives or tools. Some of the men had families.

The attacks have taken place across China and are presumably copycat crimes. ...
Shooting rampages are rare in China. It is difficult to buy guns of any kind here. Sharp objects and tools are the weapons of choice for homicides.

Although official news organizations have been quick to publish initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to play down any suggestion of dysfunction within Chinese society. In presenting China as a “harmonious society” — the signature propaganda phrase of President Hu Jintao — the government often deletes dissonant reports from the Internet and other media platforms.

A report on a Web site that monitors government control of the Chinese news media said the Propaganda Ministry had issued an order Wednesday telling news organizations not to send journalists to the site of the attack in Shaanxi. The report could not be independently confirmed.

Some scholars and writers have speculated that the attacks underscore the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through rapid economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is widening, and where corrupt officials often exercise power arbitrarily, fueling widespread frustrations among ordinary citizens.

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* Of course, that doesn't explain the attacks in the countryside, but as the country shifts to an urban values economy...

“In the past 30 years, China has seen drastic social change, and people now pay too much attention to the material while neglecting spiritual development,” said Ma Ai, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Politics and Law. “We believe a rapidly changing social environment has a huge influence on people’s personalities. That’s the deeper correlation we should attend to.”

The first of the wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 15 children and their teacher were wounded in an attack at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.

The following day, in Jiangsu Province, an attacker with a knife injured 29 kindergarteners and three adults. Protesting parents took to the streets chanting, “We want the truth! We want our babies back!”

Then, in Shandong Province, a man wielding a hammer beat five kindergartners and a teacher. The man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire with two other children in his arms. The attacker died, and the children survived.