On November 11, 2024, dozens of Chinese were killed and many more injured as a 62-year-old driver unhappy about a divorce settlement plowed his car into a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai, running down people on the sports track. Just five days later, eight people were killed and 17 wounded in a knife attack on the campus of a vocational school in Yixing, in Jiangsu province, a city famed since ancient times for its clay teapots. The suspect was reportedly enraged because he had failed an exam and not received his graduation certificate. 

These cases were merely the latest in a string of brutal attacks in China killing scores of people in the fall of 2024. Collectively, they brought renewed discussion over a period of weeks of a phenomenon that has been a feature of Chinese media coverage of such cases since at least the 1990s — “social revenge” (报复社会). Not used in other Chinese-language contexts such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, “social revenge,” or “revenge against society,” is the idea that assailants, particularly from the disaffected ranks of society, have perpetrated attacks against innocent people in a desperate bid to air their grievances.

In a story published on May 8, 1991, the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper announced its latest seasonal “strike hard” (严打) campaign by police across the country to deal with “serious crime.” The article, which made no allowances for the social and economic motivations behind such attacks, pledged that the police would resolutely deal with “serious criminal offenders who are desperate and crazy to retaliate against society, and put a brake on their arrogance.” The report also mentioned the need to contain and regulate explosive materials, suggesting attacks with homemade chemicals and explosives were on the rise. 

Five years later, such attacks apparently continued unabated, and the police again advertised a “strike hard” campaign in the People’s Daily targeting “successive cases of bombings by criminals in deliberate retaliation against society” (连续发生犯罪分子蓄意报复社会的爆炸案件). 

The Turbulent 2000s

The acceleration of economic development from the late 1990s in China, and the rapid urban growth that attended this process, brought renewed prosperity, but also a sharp divide between rich and poor. Millions of migrant workers left the countryside for urban centers, seeking work but also living precarious lives in often substandard conditions, without access to social welfare and services. As the physical city expanded, this also put rural communities — many within or on the outskirts of developing urban centers — on a collision course with developers and local governments. Problems such as the “forced demolition” of residential properties brought a rise in social unrest — which could take the form of violent acts claiming the lives of ordinary people. 

The term “revenge society” was regularly used through the 2000s. In August 2005, after a 42-year-old farmer with terminal lung cancer set off a homemade explosive on a bus in the city of Fuzhou, injuring 31 people, the magazine Lifeweekly (三联生活周刊) called the incident “individual terrorism” (一个人的恐怖主义), but noted that the incident did not clearly fit the pattern of “revenge against society.” People discussing the case, it noted, had been “unable to find the actual rationalization behind his social revenge” (却找不到他报复社会真实). 

The term often seemed a way to frame or make sense of cases of incredible and sometimes mysterious brutality — particularly against the backdrop of a controlled media environment in which it was difficult to openly discuss many of the objective social factors behind these cases, including labor rights violations, forced demolition, and migrant discrimination. 

In June 2009, after bus driver Li Guoqing (李国清) killed four people by driving recklessly through traffic for nearly seven miles, the China Youth Daily began by framing the incident as a case of “revenge against society.” After all, Li was reportedly frustrated after being forced by his company to take a substitute shift while he was on leave, and this seemed to be the reason giving rise to his mad and destructive drive. But the newspaper also questioned the use of the term. “It is doubtful whether the term ‘revenge society’ is appropriate. When Li Guoqing ‘retaliates against society,’ is it really because society has harmed him? Taking revenge against society implies that society is a party to be held accountable, and it also implies the responsibility of society as a subject, which obscures the role and responsibility of the government.” 

The late 2000s was still a time of relative discursive space for China’s press, though always under the watchful eye of Chinese Communist Party “guidance.” In its own, indirect way, China Youth Daily was suggesting that more responsibility should be placed on the government in such cases, implying that poor governance, and failing rule of law, were factors behind issues of social injustice. “When revenge is committed against society, the government should understand that it can change society and transform it through good governance to achieve social justice at a higher level,” the newspaper wrote.