Is serious violent crime on the rise in China?

Over the past year or so we've read a lot in the Western media about knife crime in places like London, about the growing violence amongst youths and so on, and living in China it was quite easy to say that there weren't the same problems there, that one thing what was good about the place was that, even though it appeared to have a lot of burglars, scammers and pickpockets, it didn't have much in the way of actual youth violence.

However, a childhood friend of my wife, around 29 years old, was recently stabbed to death by a youth at his own front door, over an argument said youth had had with the guy's uncle.

My wife's really sad about this, but she reckons that a lot of the "China is sooo safe" stuff is overstated and it can be quite a dangerous place.

I'm sure that plenty of things happen that we don't hear about. Given the population of China, and the space each person consumes, I reckon they do pretty good. I'm positive Chinese people have a smaller circle of "personal space" than Westerners have.

Also, there was a case I just read about where a chinese kid took a 3 year old toddler and raped then killed it.

If that had happened in the West, all the usual 'anglow' ranters on China Daily would have picked up on it immediately

Violence on the whole is decreasing globally with time, on average.

It sometimes seems to be otherwise due to more reporting, and memory bias.


Even if you factor in wars.

But I think serious violent crime IS on the rise in China, and has been for some time. The incidence is still so low, though, that it's not much to worry about.
I'd still feel a lot safer in even one of the more violent Chinese cities, like Shenzhen, than I would in Detroit or Miami or a number of other places...

I suspect it's reporting, myself.

I read many similar studies in parallel situations when I was lecturing in the psych of violence. The country is only just starting to report ANYTHING. So, that's my feeling,, that we are seeing increases due to this.

So it's kind of an informed guess. But, how do you tell without a study? So it is only a guess.

This is the other story I was talking about

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/China/13-yr-old-kills-infant-rapes-corpse/articleshow/4589796.cms

This is the other story I was talking about

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/China/13-yr-old-kills-infant-rapes-corpse/articleshow/4589796.cms

What really bugs me about this case is that the police are trying to blame a crime like this on the corrupting influence of internet porn.

Um, no. 13 year olds who kill babies and have sex with their bodies are not learning it from the internet. That kid is a sociopath, he needs to be, at the very least, institutionalized in a mental health facility for a long long time. But knowing China, what are the chances of that happening? Apparently he won't even be held criminally accountable because he's under 14, although his parents will have to pay some sort of monetary compensation. And of course, blaming it on the internet they have a convenient scapegoat and yet another excuse for why everything on the net needs to be harmonized even further.

The people on China Daily who pick up on equivalent cases in the West as being demonstrative of our barbarity, will probably just twist this to blame western influences.

One hears stories in this country.  Seems to me the government must hush up most of it, and people conclude that it's very safe, which is what they want to believe.  It's probably always been worse than was reported.

I think foreigners are safer, because messing with us brings ATTENTION, and we all have some guanxi.

I wouldn't be surprised if crime rates are climbing, including violence.  There's been a lot of layoffs lately, and desperation breeds theft.

But I'm with Nobody on the overall picture: eliminate factors such as war and economic upheaval and the numbers are inching their way down over time.

I think serious violent crime is a common occurance in China, it's just not reported. My second job in China was at a college in Wuxi. The school tried to enforce a curfew for us teachers as Wuxi was so dangerous. Of course we fought it and won. Ironically at the end of the school year in exam time there was a double killing on my college campus. This woman who worked in the office went crazy and killed her female co-worker and her 4 year daughter with a hammer. This story barely got a mention in the news. The school did it's best to keep this story under wraps.

Egad!

I feel that it is just under reported.  During my six years in China.  One of my private students was killed in a sexual molested, 11 years old.  It never made the papers.  One month ago a freshman was murdered at my university.  Now they check id's while entering the building, that one never made it to the papers or news either.  I remember a story about a young woman in South China who was killed and after a short investigation the police had to be paid to continue the investigation. 

I personally just had my home burlarized for the second time in a year.  They stole my pants a purse and my phone which was right next to my pillow.  When I reported it to the supervisor she said it was not her problem, even though we supposedly have a guard on duty 24/7.  MMMM wonder who the thief is??

In my entire 50 years I had never known anyone who had been murdered before coming to China.

About 4 or 5 years ago a female foreign teacher from America was physically assaulted coming out of a popular expat bar in Kunming. A couple of local guys jumped her, hit her, and would have raped her had some other customers not come out of the bar and pulled them off her. The attackers ran off. The incident never made the local media, although it was reported to the police.

There is also a lot of crime here that never gets reported out of fear of retribution or some such. You know the kind where I send some guys over to trash your DVD store and beat you up because you're undercutting my prices on Friends boxed sets, or some local boss wants to use my land to build a shopping mall and I don't want to give it up so he sends guys around to rough me up and threaten my family. No one ever goes to the police about that sort of thing so of course they don't end up in the official crime statistics.