China vows to act after nine die in school attack

China vowed to "strike hard" yesterday to quell public alarm after a lone man hacked seven children to death, the sixth attack in a Chinese school in less than two months.

Sixteen children have been killed and dozens injured since late March, forcing the government to ramp up security. Cameras have been rigged up in schools and guards equipped with teargas.

The latest attacker, named as Wu Huanming, 48, wielded a meat cleaver as children arrived at the kindergarten in the city of Hanzhong, in northwest China, killing seven children and the two owners of the kindergarten. Another 11 children were injured before Mr Wu went home and killed himself, according to the local government. "Only about two of the children in the kindergarten were not injured, but I don't know how many died in the end. There was blood everywhere," a resident, Zheng Xiulan, said. "I don't know why he did it... I hadn't heard that he was mentally ill. He wasn't poor, either."

The attacks have sparked anger, since most middle-class families are restricted to a single child under China's population control policy and spend huge amounts of time and effort on raising their offspring. Sociologists say the deaths reflect a lack of support for the mentally ill and rising stress resulting from huge social inequalities in China's fast-changing society.

Comments on the internet contrasted the huge security operation surrounding the Beijing Olympics and the current Expo in Shanghai. Dissidents have been arrested to ensure the focus remains on China as an emerging economic superpower.

The country's ministries of Public Security and Education immediately vowed harsh punishment of attackers. "We insist on striking hard and on strict protection," officials were told in a video conference, according to the Ministry of Public Security. "Strike so that criminals won't dare touch children, and protect so that they cannot touch children."

The ministries pledged to check schools for vulnerabilities, "leaving no corners untouched".

China has shown no mercy to previous attackers. An unemployed doctor who killed eight children with a knife on March 23 after being jilted by his girlfriend was executed barely a month later. On the same day as the execution, another attacker stabbed 16 students and a teacher after being laid off from another school.

Following the spate of killings, some 2,000 police officers and security guards have been posted at the gates of schools in Hanzhong, an industrial city of nearly four million people.

However, the increased security presence in the city failed to prevent yesterday's attack at Shengshui Temple kindergarten on the outskirts. No ages were given for the young victims but they were likely to have been no more than five years old. The state-run news agency, Xinhua, said five were boys and two were girls.

Investigators were looking for a reason for the rampage as it emerged there was some unspecified link between Mr Wu and the headmaster. Many of the school attacks have been blamed on personal grudges or on people with psychiatric problems. Some of those behind the last flurry of attacks had lost their jobs at state-owned enterprises or lost out during China's economic surge.

"I personally feel that media reports about these attacks have helped to create a copycat effect," said Yang Dongping, an expert on education at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "People who are mentally unstable or who nurse hatred towards society then feel that this is a way of exacting revenge, or of making their demands."

There have been knife attacks on police stations and government buildings, but the latest assaults have focused on children. In Beijing, up to 7,000 armed police and security forces have been deployed at city kindergartens and schools.