China hit again with fatal violence as at least eight die in stabbing

Eight people were killed and 17 others injured in a stabbing attack Saturday night in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi, police said in a statement, in what appeared to be a second burst of deadly violence in China in less than a week.

A person wielding a knife attacked people about 6:30 p.m. at the Wuxi Vocational Institute of Arts and Technology, police in Yixing, a district of Wuxi, near Shanghai, said in their statement. A suspect, described as a 21-year-old man who had graduated from the college this year, was arrested at the school, police said.

The stabbing took place only days after a man killed at least 35 people by driving a vehicle into a crowd at a sports center in the southern city of Zhuhai, in the deadliest known violent attack in China in a decade. Authorities quickly moved to censor information and commentaries about the attack, which also injured at least 43 people. The driver stabbed himself, police said, and was in a hospital in a coma.

On the Chinese social media platform Weibo, news of Saturday’s stabbing was shared widely, with thousands of comments by users.

“How many cases have happened this week …,” one wrote. “Again!!” read another post.

By early Sunday, censors appeared to be scrubbing discussion of the attack, in keeping with the Chinese government’s usual strategy after mass tragedies. In such situations, the government has suppressed voices of witnesses and survivors, minimized public showings of grief and promoted only official accounts and assurances.

Violent rampages targeting random civilians are rare in China, where police surveillance is ubiquitous, but there has been a series of attacks over the past year.

In September, a 10-year-old student was fatally stabbed by a Chinese man near a Japanese school in southern China. In June, two Americans were stabbed in northeast China, and a Chinese national who tried to intervene was knifed in the abdomen. In May, at least two people were killed and 21 others injured when an assailant went on a rampage with a knife at a hospital.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.