SHENZHEN – Four months after a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy was fatally stabbed in Shenzhen, a court in the southern Chinese city sentenced to death the man accused of his murder.
The verdict was reached on the first day of the trial on Jan 24, the Kyodo news agency reported, quoting Japanese Ambassador to China Kenji Kanasugi.
It was one of several cases of public violence that have been speedily dealt with in recent months.
Kyodo added, quoting a Japanese official in Tokyo, that according to the Chinese court, the 45-year-old perpetrator had hoped to attract online attention through the attack.
The trial was not open to the media. But for hours that day, Japanese reporters huddled outside the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, awaiting updates on the case that shook the Japanese community in China and stoked fears among the Japanese of anti-Japan sentiment.
The verdict capped a busy week for China’s courts as the Chinese authorities sought to turn the page on four high-profile violent crimes which in 2024 cast a spotlight on “revenge against society” attacks across the country.
The Chinese authorities executed two men on Jan 20 for deadly massacres which they carried out in November 2024, and sentenced a third to death on Jan 23 for a knife attack in June 2024.
Asked about the back-to-back resolution of the cases this week, Associate Professor Alfred Wu of the National University of Singapore said: “Before the Chinese New Year, they want to deal with these unfortunate incidents… (in the hope that) the new year will be better.” Chinese New Year begins on Jan 29 this year.
‘Unusually fast’
The handling of the four cases was “unusually fast”, said Mr David Zhang, a Beijing-based lawyer who has practised criminal law in China for over a decade.
Based on his experience, cases involving the death penalty usually take two or three years to resolve, he told The Straits Times.
The men who had carried out deadly massacres were executed on Jan 20, just over two months after they committed their crimes, and about a month after they were sentenced.
Fan Weiqiu, 62, killed 35 people and injured dozens of others in China’s deadliest attack in a decade. He had ploughed a sport utility vehicle into a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai on Nov 11, angry over his broken marriage and dissatisfied with the division of assets after his divorce, state media reported.
He was tried and sentenced on Dec 27, after pleading guilty.
Five days after Fan’s attack, Xu Jiajin, 21, went on a knife rampage at his alma mater, killing eight and injuring 15 at the vocational school in eastern Wuxi city on Nov 16. He was sentenced to death on Dec 17.
The local police had earlier said that Xu’s actions stemmed from failing to graduate and being dissatisfied with his internship pay.
The other two cases for which death sentences were meted out this week involved victims who were Japanese nationals in China.
On Jan 23, a Suzhou court sentenced Zhou Jiasheng, 52, to the death penalty for stabbing three people at a bus stop near a Japanese school in June 2024.
He injured a Japanese mother and child, and killed Chinese bus attendant Hu Youping, 54, who had gone to their aid.
A Japanese government official said that according to the Chinese court, Zhou was unemployed, debt-ridden, and did not want to continue living, Kyodo reported on Jan 23.
The Shenzhen case involved the stabbing of a Japanese boy, born to a Japanese father and Chinese mother, who was on his way to school on Sept 18.
The attack took place on the anniversary of the Mukden Incident, a false-flag operation by Japanese troops in 1931 in north-eastern China that eventually led to a full-scale invasion of China in 1937.
While both these cases had raised concerns that the perpetrators might have acted on anti-Japanese sentiment, the court verdicts did not mention Japan in their ruling, Kyodo reported.
Why so fast?
The speedy processing of these cases, surmised Mr Zhang, the criminal lawyer, stemmed from their high profile and widespread public interest.
The Zhuhai incident, in particular, was China’s deadliest attack in a decade, and had attracted widespread domestic and international attention – as did the Wuxi case, which took place shortly in its wake.
The swift resolution of the Zhuhai and Wuxi cases has been popular among Chinese netizens. Many applauded the authorities’ approach, given the severity of these crimes.
“Severely punishing the murderer is a comfort to the dead,” said one Weibo user from Jiangsu province, in response to a Xinhua report on the Wuxi execution. Wuxi is in Jiangsu.
While the cases involving Japanese nationals have received comparatively less public attention in China, they have been closely monitored by the Japanese media.
Another likely factor for the speed with which the cases were dealt with is deterrence.
China has long taken the approach of meting out “swift and severe” punishments for crimes, particularly to deter copycats, said Prof Wu, who studies public governance in the country.
But even as China seeks to turn the page on these acts of violence, speedy court cases are not a silver bullet, he added.
“The most important thing is (to address) the underlying problem,” he said, adding that in these cases, it was grievances festering within society that have not been adequately addressed.
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