What in the world is going on in China???

Based on the comments I’ve read in international papers, the attitude about THREE mass attacks on children in a month could be described as “gee… how sad.” Are you kidding me?!?

In recent weeks, China has receiving renewed international criticism about their “one child” policies and renewed attempts to sterilize families so that they will be forced to submit to the “no more children” rule. They’ve even said that they would “back off” the policy.

But then, suddenly, you have three different people who just decide to go insane around the same time and attack CHILDREN??? Doesn’t anyone else think this is a little bit STRANGE?!? They aren’t setting off bombs at a café or stabbing people at random in a shopping center. They are going to primary schools and attacking CHILDREN.

- Today in Eastern China, a knife-wielding man entered a Chinese kindergarten and wounded 28 children and three adults. Most of the children were four-years-old and several of them are in critical condition.

- On Wednesday, a man broke into a primary school in southern China and wounded 15 students and a teacher.

- On March 23, a doctor killed eight children at an elementary school in the Jiangsu province. He admitted to the killings and was actually executed earlier this week – on Wednesday, the day the 15 students and teacher were wounded. (On a side note, I do appreciate China’s system of swift justice. He murdered eight children and admitted to it. In the United States, he would have been given food, shelter, and job training for the next 30 years and then let out on parole…)

What’s really sad is that many Americans look at China with disdain. People think they hate children and therefore these acts are simply another effect of a society that kills their unborn, leaves newborn girls to die, and allows children to be adopted by other countries because they don’t want more children themselves. In fact, the Chinese adore their children. The one-child policy enforced in many provinces make the Chinese child a precious gift and the parents’ only hope for the future. Most assuredly, these children who were killed were dearly loved and most probably their parents’ one and only offspring.

So what is causing this spree of child attacks? I don’t know. But we can speculate.

Perhaps the attackers want to cause the most damage to their society by taking away one of their most precious commodities – their children. Perhaps there is more going on here than we can understand and since the government has backed off on the sterilization of parents, they have found another way to incite attacks against children. After all, even though individual parents deeply love their children, the Chinese government looks at the bigger picture, such as population growth, overuse of resources, etc. Maybe they’ve found a way to take care of the population problem without sterilization… just kill some of the children who are already here.

Ultimately, I don’t know if these three cases are related or not, but you have to admit that it seems more than a coincidence that three unrelated men in three different areas of China would go into the same place (a primary school setting) and do the same thing (attack children with a KNIFE).

The whole situation is incredibly sad. We should pray not only for the physical healing of those children who are still in critical condition, but also the emotional healing for all the children who attend these schools and also for the families who have lost their precious children.

Sonya Haskins, author of Homeschooling for the Rest of Us