{"id":18196,"date":"2012-12-18T19:25:21","date_gmt":"2012-12-18T18:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=18196"},"modified":"2012-12-18T19:26:17","modified_gmt":"2012-12-18T18:26:17","slug":"chinese-police-suspect-man-who-stabbed-23-kids-influenced-by-doomsday-rumor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/chinese-police-suspect-man-who-stabbed-23-kids-influenced-by-doomsday-rumor\/","title":{"rendered":"Man who stabbed 23 kids ‘influenced’ by doomsday rumor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre, a man stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>CS Monitor<\/a> |<\/p>\n

Chinese police said Monday that the man who stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre may have been \u201cinfluenced\u201d by doomsday predictions.<\/p>\n

A belief that the\u00a0Mayan calendar<\/a>\u00a0predicts an apocalypse this Friday, Dec. 21,\u00a0has gained peculiar currency here. And the knifing spree is the darkest manifestation yet of how end-of-the-world rumors have taken hold in\u00a0China<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Doomsday rumors, generally lighthearted spoofs, have been especially widespread on the Chinese Internet since the success of the Hollywood blockbuster \u201c2012.\u201d That was the first major American film to portray the Chinese as \u201cgood guys,\u201d builders of \u201carks\u201d that offer salvation to some survivors of a cataclysmic flood. But Chinese authorities, nervous about threats to social stability, have been showing increasing signs of concern about the public’s willingness to believe the rumors.<\/p>\n

Police and government media are warning people not to be fooled by doomsday-related scams, alleged doomsday cultists have been arrested, and shoppers fearful of coming darkness have bought up all the candles they can find.<\/p>\n

Police in Guangshan county, in the central Chinese province of\u00a0Henan<\/a>, said they were holding the suspect, Min Yongjun, in Friday\u2019s school stabbings \u201cfor further investigation into his motives\u201d and medical history, according to an announcement on the local government\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

The police \u201csuspect\u201d that Mr. Min \u201cinjured innocent people and children with a knife because he was influenced by doomsday rumors,\u201d the statement added. None of the wounded children died of their injuries.<\/p>\n

Chinese are susceptible to doomsday reports, suggests social psychologist Wei Zhizhong, because \u201cscientific knowledge is still not widespread in China. People have abandoned their traditional mystical relationship with nature, but they are still exploring scientific ways of coexisting\u201d with the natural world.<\/p>\n

Lost in the transition, says Mr. Wei, a researcher at\u00a0Wuhan University<\/a>\u2019s Psychological Research Institute, \u201csome people respond to things like doomsday rumors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week the People\u2019s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, urged the government to \u201crelease timely, authoritative information to avoid some people taking doomsday jokes seriously, which may trigger irrational panic and chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

The media \u201cshould not follow the trend of feeding doomsday emotion but should guide the public with rationality,\u201d the paper suggested.<\/p>\n

The role of the media<\/strong><\/p>\n

For some observers, though, the Chinese media are poorly placed to influence public opinion since censorship has undermined their authority.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne reason that rumors prevail is because of the damaged credibility of traditional media,\u201d wrote Liu Xiaocong, a TV producer, in an opinion piece for the English-language edition of Global Times last week. \u201cIn countries where the media is regularly subject to restraints imposed from above \u2026 people lose faith in it and seize onto stories that haven\u2019t been put through the official filters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The People\u2019s Daily published its warning in the wake of reports that in two provinces, shoppers had cleaned local shops out of candles, spooked by reports that the world would be plunged into three days of darkness on Friday.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Shanghai<\/a>\u00a0police issued a caution earlier this month on their Weibo account, similar to a\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0feed, saying they had received 25 reports in a 24-hour period of people spreading doomsday rumors, apparently as some sort of scam.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe police warn citizens that ‘doomsday’ is simply a rumor,\u201d the Weibo post read.<\/p>\n

Some are putting the rumors to political use, according to state-run media. The government is cracking down on a group that it says is urging a \u201cdecisive battle\u201d against the \u201cRed Dragon\u201d Communist Party, according to the provincial Shaanxi Daily.<\/p>\n

Members of the \u201cAlmighty God\u201d group, which has been described as a cult by the state media, have been distributing leaflets announcing the end of the world this year, the paper said. Dozens of them have been arrested in different provincial cities, according to official statements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre, a man stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school. CS Monitor | Chinese police said Monday that the man who stabbed 23 children in a rural Chinese elementary school just hours before the Newtown, Conn., massacre may have been \u201cinfluenced\u201d by doomsday predictions. A belief that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18196","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}