Knife attack on Japanese mother and child in China triggers anti-foreigner feelings

BEIJING - A knife attack on a Japanese woman and her child in China on June 24 has triggered yet another wave of xenophobic comments on Chinese social media, with some even hailing the attacker as a “hero”.

The latest incident in Suzhou follows a previous one on June 10 involving four American college instructors who were injured in a public park in Jilin province.

Despite the authorities saying these are isolated cases, the two incidents are raising concerns among foreigners, within and outside China, about growing anti-foreigner sentiments in a country where violent crimes are rare.

The suspected assailant in Suzhou – a high-tech manufacturing hub west of Shanghai – was arrested at the scene, a bus stop near a Japanese school. He was identified by police as a 52-year-old unemployed Chinese man.

The two Japanese victims suffered non-life threatening injuries and were taken to hospital, said Suzhou police. A Chinese woman who tried to prevent the attack was seriously wounded.

While official investigations have not revealed any motives for the attack, that did not stop netizens from suggesting that the nationality of the victims was a contributing factor.

“Japanese people should reflect. Why were they targeted and not other people?” said one of the top comments on a news report on Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo. The comment drew more than 450 likes and over 360 replies.

“Although I don’t agree with such extreme methods, but I can’t help but ask, who is the hero that did this?” said another comment on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok.

In a post on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform, a user asked why Japanese people were allowed to have schools in China. It drew a response that read: “China is actively promoting itself to the world, and comments like yours are shutting the door.”

China’s foreign ministry has described both the Jilin and Suzhou attacks as “isolated” incidents. On June 25, a spokeswoman added in response to a question on the latest case that China “will continue to take effective measures to protect the safety of all foreign nationals in China like (we protect) our own citizens”.

Prominent commentator Hu Xujin, who is former editor of the nationalistic tabloid Global Times, wrote on June 25 that he agreed with the official assessment that both incidents do not represent any broader trend, and their significance should not be exaggerated.

“While there may be some ‘anti-Japanese sentiment’ on the internet, this does not mean that our society supports taking extreme actions against Japanese people in China,” he added.

But foreigners’ concerns seem to have lingered, as the US and Japanese populations in China have plummeted in recent years. Some 800 Americans are studying in China in 2024, compared with 15,000 around 2012. An estimated 100,000 Japanese nationals currently live in China, down from a peak of 150,000 around 2012.

In an interview published on June 25, US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, in a rare rebuke of his host country, said that Beijing has been intimidating citizens who attend US-organised events in China and stirring up anti-American sentiments.

Mr Burns was also quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying that he has not been given sufficient information from the authorities on the motives of the suspected assailant in the Jilin case.

The Jilin case involved four instructors from Cornell College in Iowa who were invited to teach at Beihua University and a Chinese tourist who tried to stop the attack. None of them suffered life-threatening injuries.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded to the American envoy’s claims on June 26, saying that they are “factually inaccurate” and “did not contribute to the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations”.

China is committed to promoting cultural exchanges with the US, she said, adding that it was the US who has unreasonably harassed and repatriated Chinese students studying there. She did not directly address Mr Burns’ allegations of intimidation.

Mr Zhang Dechun, a PhD candidate in the politics of modern China at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told The Straits Times that based on his research, Japan and the US are two common targets of such outward-directed nationalism online.

In particular, anti-Japanese views are commonly found in China’s tightly regulated Internet, fuelled by war-time history and bilateral disputes such as over the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands in the East China Sea.

Asked why the authorities do not clamp down on such behaviour, Mr Zhang, who has researched China’s cyber nationalists, said that the Chinese government often tacitly promotes it for reasons such as to build national unity, but it is also careful to manage them from spilling into social unrest in real life.

Earlier in June, a Chinese blogger who filmed himself vandalising the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates some World War II criminals, was cheered by Chinese netizens.