In November 2024, China experienced its deadliest known instance of public violence in a decade. A man, upset over his divorce settlement, plowed an SUV into a sports complex in the southern city of Zhuhai, killing 35 people and injuring over 40 others.
The incident followed a string of indiscriminate mass attacks in China. Known as “revenge on society” crimes, they have surged with alarming frequency as perpetrators who saw no alternative channel to vent their grievances lashed out at innocent bystanders. In 2024, 63 people were killed in these mass attacks, while 166 were injured.
Although Beijing has characterized these incidents as “isolated,” the spate of recent tragedies sheds light on a confluence of systemic factors that culminate in mass violence: inadequate social welfare, a slowing economy, and austere censorship. China’s continued internal instability could have crucial geopolitical implications for Taiwan, specifically on strategic maneuvers in the Indo-Pacific.
While China does have social welfare programs, the current economic system provides insufficient resources for the working class and unemployed individuals. First, the hukou (户口) system prevents rural migrant workers in the urban workforce from obtaining urban residency, leading to much lower pay. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) especially exacerbate income inequality. Many migrant workers also work without social security coverage, which is a requirement for receiving a pension upon retirement.
Second, the rural minimum living standard guarantee, or dibao (低保) program, has suffered from inconsistent eligibility standards, with only 20 to 30 percent of eligible households receiving the benefit. Migrant workers are also ineligible for dibao. Medical insurance likewise undergoes opaque distribution. With services purposefully stratified, government officials and urban employees receive outsized benefits.
Third, unemployment insurance provides minimal benefits and limited coverage. In 2020, for instance, out of over 25 million unemployed workers in one quarter, only 2.3 million received benefits. As of last September, Beijing reported that 245 million people were covered by unemployment insurance, rising 25.5 percent from the year before. Yet, as the Ministry of Civil Affairs asserted last month, assistance to unemployed people who have not received their unemployment insurance has to be improved.
Ultimately, the porous social safety net suffers from a lack of investment. Public welfare investments in China lag behind those of other industrial economies like Mexico, and local governments are left responsible for financing over 90 percent of social services. Yet, they are only given half of their tax revenue and struggle with mounting debt burdens, with many cities bound to interest payments that comprise over a third of their annual revenue. In sum, social services cannot improve when current maintenance is already a local challenge. Social welfare benefits remain inaccessible for many blue-collar workers and unemployed people, with resources focused on urban workers and state officials. The biased allocation of resources demonstrates a structural cause of widespread discontent.
Without an efficient social safety net, many are left with a sense of economic alienation, made worse by the country’s economic slowdown. Following a tumultuous series of events in recent years – draconian pandemic lockdown measures, mass protests, and the property sector crisis – the Chinese economy has stagnated, taking an immense toll on a rising number of university graduates entering the workforce. In 2023, one in five 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas was unemployed.
In the face of climbing youth unemployment figures and declining consumer confidence readings, the government did what it knew best – suppress and erase. New figures were not released until early 2024 and were published with a reformulated methodology that excluded students, creating an illusion of improvement. Nonetheless, China’s youth unemployment figure has continued to grow and remains at 16 percent.
China’s GDP, the second largest globally, has also been growing more slowly, increasing by only 4.6 percent in the third quarter of 2024 and falling short of the country’s 5 percent target for the year. Although China has implemented stimulus packages entailing sizable mortgage and interest rate cuts, they have yet to improve flagging economic growth. This economic downturn has resulted in public disillusionment and a shared sentiment of fatalism.
In contrast to two decades ago, people in China are now more likely to think that structural factors decide how rich or poor a person becomes and much less likely to believe that hard work guarantees reward. Dissatisfaction began to manifest in public sentiment, such as in the passive resistance of the “lying flat” movement, the outrage against shrinking medical insurance coverage manifested in the White-haired Movement, and online lamentations about getting stuck in the “garbage time” of history.
As social unrest grew, revenge on society crimes also increased in number. These trends can likewise be traced back to the helplessness felt by individuals in the face of systemic barriers against socio-economic advancement. A small but climbing number of people have turned to violent demonstrations of anger and frustration.
Further compounding the issue, the Chinese public cannot openly discuss these incidents nor examine the underlying societal stressors motivating the perpetrators.
At the promptly sanitized sites of these killing sprees, police and plainclothes officers removed flower bouquets placed by the public and dispersed onlookers and foreign journalists. Hospitalized victims were kept away from reporters. China’s strictly monitored online search engines were scrubbed clean of videos capturing the incidents, eyewitness accounts, and trending hashtags relevant to the events. On social media, calls to address immediate needs (like increasing psychological counseling resources) and structural changes (such as improving individual rights) are quickly removed. Worse still, there is a lack of comprehensive data on mass killings in China, which hinders analyses of trends and effective prevention.
The official crisis response to these killings presents a grim pattern of censorship – removing online discussions and delaying news reports, erasure of grief and trauma, and intensifying surveillance against possible dissenters. This mechanism of repression, in and of itself, exposes structural flaws in China’s political system. When the public cannot openly discuss these incidents, people cannot examine the underlying societal stressors motivating the perpetrators. Individuals cannot participate in addressing and resolving the systemic injustices they have experienced, and censored public discourse could only lead to further uncertainty, fear, and isolation. As media suppression has grown increasingly heavy-handed, so has the corrosion of people’s trust in government.
As mass assaults more than tripled compared to previous years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for local governments to prevent future mass killings more vigilantly. However, instead of countering civil unrest by improving transparency and opening channels for communication, local officials are beginning to enhance surveillance on families, marriages, and neighborhoods in small towns and large cities. This is likely to continue the cycle of repression, resistance, and retaliatory violence, prolonging an era of domestic instability amid the public’s increasing weariness toward public safety and the government’s crisis management.
Domestic instability in China could prompt more significant geopolitical disruption abroad, particularly for Taiwan. Historically, struggling economies and worsening geopolitical relations in rising great powers are indicators of heightened foreign aggression. In China, the suppression of domestic dissent could be complemented by the rallying of nationalism that stabilizes public sentiment and distracts from internal declines. With China also establishing its most potent military capability so far, some analysts believe that a war over Taiwan is most likely to take place this decade.
Notably, China could employ gray-zone tactics that fall just below the threshold of war, minimizing U.S. involvement. After President Lai Ching-te visited Hawai‘i and Guam in late 2024, the Taiwanese military observed the largest Chinese naval deployment in nearly three decades, which included both the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the Coast Guard stationed across the East and South China Seas and Western Pacific far off the east coast of Taiwan. The expansive venture shows how China could lock down the First Island Chain, stretching from the Philippines to Japan, to cut Taiwan off from assistance.
Given Xi’s reported unease with China’s status quo, demonstrating nationalism toward what Chinese popularly deem a renegade province could help redirect public focus from the country’s economic downturn and strengthen support around the Chinese Communist Party.
In a deeply flawed economic and political system, it remains to be seen whether China can overcome economic strife. If not, the CCP may resort to military adventurism. As China grapples with its internal challenges and seeks to divert attention from domestic turmoil, the possibility of external aggression, particularly toward Taiwan, grows more likely. If China fails to address the foundational causes of instability at home, including the CCP’s suffocating repression of dissent, the consequences will be felt far beyond its borders.