Just missed a mass stabbing

This was a close call.

I'm in Beijing at the moment. On Monday, I went to the Carrefour supermarket closest to my hotel to get some Diet Coke and some yoghurt and a couple of other bits and pieces. When I got there, the lights were off, and the place was surrounded by armed normal police, People's Armed Police (the really hard police, like a SWAT team), and some soldiers. The whole street was quiet, which is something that never happens in China. It was really quite spooky.

One of the Police told me that I should leave, as there was "an extremely dangerous armed siege going on, but I can't tell you any more". He then, gloriously, shouted to all the marksmen whose guns were pointing at the supermarket door, and said "Look! This foreign guy can speak really good Chinese!" Some asked me where I'd learned my Chinese, and I suggested that they should perhaps concentrate on their dangerous armed-siege situation, as this was rather more of an immediate concern.

It turns out that a madman with a knife was running round the supermarket stabbing people. There's a fairly basic article in English at Knife attack in Beijing store leaves 1 dead, 3 hurt, including toddler - CHINA - Globaltimes.cn, and a more detailed article for those of you who can read Chinese or who are prepared to tolerate the incoherence of Google Translate at http://news.sohu.com/20130723/n382349050.shtml.

All in all, it was quite a scary thing. Violent crime is very unusual in China, so this was a bit of a shock. I'm very glad I didn't get to Carrefour 20 minutes earlier, but I feel terrible for the families of the victims, especially the family of the kid, who's the same age as my younger daughter.

 

I know this Carrefour well. Given the typical crowds on a Monday morning, with a semi-automatic weapon he could easily have killed 30 or 40 people, and possibly 100 or more.

In fact, the last time I was close to violent crime in China was in 1994, when I ended up lying on the floor in a taxi about 200 metres from China's only major non-government gun massacre: Tian Mingjian incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. So I have a reasonable idea of what an unhinged person can do with a gun.

 

Shouldn't you perhaps concentrate on your dangerous armed-siege situation?

At university, initially. But many years of working in China helped improve it.

 

I was out with a fairly senior government friend last night. He thinks that part of the problem is that this rapid growth - while better-spread than it was during the growth periods of many other countries - has left some people behind. The mentally-ill guy in Carrefour may be one of them (certainly Beijing had the money to keep him in a psychiatric hospital rather than release him to his family's care), but other recent massacres - such as the Xiamen bus fire (see Xiamen bus fire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) - do appear to be caused by resentful people who think they're not seeing the benefits of China's economic growth.

There's also been massive societal upheaval over the last few years - if I recall correctly, something like 300 million people have moved from the countryside to the city in the last ten years, and that's left some people isolated and confused and resentful. Things are modernising incredibly rapidly, and again, I think that could be quite bewildering if you're not very stable to start with. My Shanghai office manager got electricity in his village 15 years ago; this year, he went to Australia on holiday: that's a massive change in lifestyle over a very short period, and it's not something that's speicific to him - it's happened to hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. Overall, things are going very well in China, but some people have snapped under the pressure of this huge transformation.

 

It's real. But it's being badly misreported in the American, Australian and British press, and Americans and Australians seem to be falling for the misreporting: I've spoken to a lot of people who've expressed concern about China being at best "increasingly assertive" or more often "increasingly aggressive" over territorial disputes. The increased assertiveness / aggression is actually coming far more from Japan: Shinzo Abe won power on a very nationalist ticket, and has been pushing to ramp up disputes with China over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, and with South Korea (which itself has a more nationalist government now under Park Geun-hye) over the Dokdo/Liancourt/Takeshima Islands. America, meanwhile, seems to have been pressuring the Philippines to ramp up disputes over islands in the South China sea. But America is painting all of these disputes (other than the one between Japan and SK) as a sign of an increasingly-assertive China, while at the same time increasing its own military presence in the region, with, for example, its new base in Darwin. Between the increased military presence and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, America is actively engaging in an encirclement policy against China, which isn't going down especially well in China. Encouraging Japanese nationalism is a dangerous way of doing this, but the Americans seem to think it'll be OK. We'll see.

 

Well, it's hard to generalise. But in general, there's a great deal of interest in the rest of the world.

As soon as people can afford to go abroad on holiday, they do so, but most of them go with tour groups, and eat Chinese food in Paris, Chinese food in London, Chinese food in Berlin and Chinese food in Rome, and then go home and complain that the food was rubbish.

But people do want to go abroad. And people always like talking to foreigners: a foreigner will always draw a crowd. And there is generally a lot of awareness of foreign news - far more than there is in the US.

That said, from what my friends have said, it's not much fun being black in China. There are foreigners, and there are foreigners. That kind of thing is improving, but China is still not a bastion of liberalism.

 

I'd definitely recommend it for a vacation, as long as you're not looking for anything relaxing. There's loads to see and do; it's increasingly easy to get around; people are generally friendly (as long as they're not stabbing you); and the hotels are great. And beer is 30 cents for a 640ml bottle. I'm going to go out and have some with my dinner now.