Wen admits attacks lay bare deep ills
Premier Wen Jiabao says the recent spate of school attacks has laid bare deeply rooted social ills which deserve attention from the authorities and the utmost efforts to solve them.
His brief interview with Phoenix TV yesterday marked the first time a top Communist Party leader had commented publicly on the brutal assaults on young children, which have sparked shock and outrage across the country.
Wen said he felt extremely sorry for the young victims and their families. 'Apart from taking immediate action to beef up school security nationwide, we should dig deeper and look for the root reasons for the problems,' he said. 'These (reasons) include a certain level of social tension.'
The central government has launched a 10-day nationwide inspection to shore up school security following a series of killings and attacks at kindergartens and schools in the past two months. Initiated by the Public Security and Education ministries and the State Administration of Work Safety, it will attempt to heighten security awareness and will dole out extra security funding and upgrade infrastructure.
In the latest school killings, a disgruntled villager from Shaanxi's Nanzheng county went on a rampage in a privately run village kindergarten on Wednesday morning, hacking to death seven children and two adults with a meat cleaver and wounding 11 children.
An official from the Communist Party's media division of Hanzhong , the city that administers Nangzheng county, said yesterday that the 11 children admitted to hospital were all in stable condition.
State media reported that Wu Huanming, 48, had gone on the rampage after failing to settle a lease dispute with the proprietor of the kindergarten, Wu Hongying. She and her mother were the two adults killed.
The killings occurred in the sixth such attack on children in the past two months, which have prompted authorities to strengthen security measures including the deployment of police officers and security guards at kindergartens and schools.
In Beijing, education authorities have hired 2,000 security guards for 500 primary schools and kindergartens.
And police officers armed with submachine guns have been seen on patrol at schools and kindergartens in Changsha, the capital of the central province of Hunan .
During a joint video conference organised by the ministries of Public Security and Education on Wednesday, Public Security minister Meng Jianzhu pledged to strike hard against such gross crimes.
'We must come down so hard on the perpetrators that they wouldn't dare to put their hands on children, and we must shore up security to such a level that they are unable to lay their hands on children,' Meng said.
The string of attacks stands in stark contrast to the much-touted harmonious society message pushed by the Communist Party in recent years. Many commentators attributed the attacks to growing public anger over social problems, corruption, police brutality, the widening wealth gap and an overall brutalisation of Chinese society that has led to widespread, untreated mental illness. Tsinghua University professor of sociology Li Dun said attacks against school children were particularly challenging because it was impossible to say where the next one would occur.
