Beijing:
Six kindergarteners and a teacher were stabbed to death and at least 20 other people were injured on Wednesday in an attack at a school in northern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
The attack, which occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Shaanxi Province, was one of the deadliest in a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren by apparent lunatics wielding knives and hand tools.
The latest attacks are presumably copycat crimes, and they have ignited fear and outrage among parents. Some parents have spoken of their reluctance to send their children off to school. The anxiety is heightened by the fact that most parents in China have only one child because of the government's strict birth control policy.
Some schools have increased security in the aftermath of the attacks; it was not immediately clear whether the Shaanxi school had done so.
The injured were taken to a hospital in the city of Hanzhong, Xinhua reported. A nurse answering the phone at the hospital said most of the victims had critical wounds to their heads.
"We are very busy saving people's lives," she said before hanging up.
Unlike in the United States, school shootings are rare in China because it is difficult to buy guns of any kind here. Sharp objects and tools are the weapons of choice.
Although official Chinese news organizations have been quick to release initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to diminish 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.
Some scholars have speculated that the attacks point to the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through significant economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is rapidly widening, and where corruption by local officials heightens frustrations among ordinary citizens.
Mental illness, too, is rarely acknowledged here, and thus treatment is in short supply.
The first of the recent wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, on China's eastern coast. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 16 children and their teacher were attacked at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.
The following day, in the city of Taixing, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, 29 kindergarten pupils and three adults were injured by an attacker with a knife Protesting parents took to the streets chanting, "We want the truth! We want our babies back!"
The day after that, Xinhua reported, five kindergarteners and a teacher were injured by a man in Shandong Province, also in eastern China. The man beat the five children with a hammer, then doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire with two other children in his arms. The attacker died.