Authorities work to bring home U.S. instructors recovering from stabbing attack in Chinese park

BEIJING — U.S. authorities worked Tuesday to repatriate four injured instructors from Iowa's Cornell College who were stabbed in the northeastern Chinese city of Jilin where they were teaching.

Jilin city police said a 55-year-old man surnamed Cui was walking in a public park on Monday when he came across a stranger. He stabbed the foreigner and three other foreigners who accompanied him, as well as a Chinese man who had approached to try to intervene, police said.

The police statement gave no indication of the motive for the attack.

The Cornell College instructors taught at Beihua University, officials at the American school said.

Among the injured was David Zabner, who was descending a mountain when he heard a scream.

“I turned around and found a man brandishing a knife at me. I didn't immediately realize what was happening. I thought my colleagues had been pushed, and he, for some reason, was trying to push me,” Zabner told Iowa Public Radio News from his hospital room.

“And then I looked at my shoulder and realized, 'I'm bleeding.' I was stabbed.'

He and the other injured were rushed to hospital for treatment and none of them were in critical condition, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said on Tuesday. during a daily press briefing. He said police believed the attack in Jilin city's Beishan Park was an isolated incident, based on a preliminary assessment, and that the investigation was ongoing.

Zabner's brother, Rep. Adam Zabner, an Iowa state lawmaker, described his brother in a social media post as a doctoral student at Tufts University who was in China as part of the Cornell-Beihua relationship.

He told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he is currently not doing any additional interviews in order to focus on his brother's return to the United States. And David Zabner did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from the AP seeking comment.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and several members of the state's congressional delegation posted on social media that they are working with officials to help in any way they can, including bringing back instructors at their home.

Cornell College President Jonathan Brand said in a statement that the instructors were attacked while in the park with a professor from Beihua, located in an outlying part of Jilin, an industrial city about 1 000 kilometers (600 miles) northeast of Beijing. Monday was a public holiday in China.

Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, posted on the social media site citizen of Iowa. “We are doing everything we can to help them and hope for their full and speedy recovery,” he wrote.

The attack came as Beijing and Washington seek to expand people-to-people exchanges to strengthen relations amid trade tensions and international issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea and the war in Ukraine.

News of the incident was suppressed in China, where the government maintains control of information on anything considered sensitive. There is little information on this, but Chinese state media have strictly adhered to the official version.

Some social media accounts posted reports about the attack in foreign media, but a hashtag about it was blocked on a popular portal and photos and videos of the incident were quickly deleted.

Cornell spokeswoman Jen Visser said in an email that the college was still gathering information about what happened and provided no further details.

Visser said the private college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, partners with Beihua University. A university press release from 2018, when the program began, says Beihua funds Cornell professors to travel to China to teach portions of computer science, math and physics courses on a period of two weeks.

According to a 2020 article on Beihua's website, the Chinese university uses American teaching methods and resources to give engineering students an international perspective and English proficiency.

About a third of the program's core courses use American textbooks and are taught by American professors, according to the newspaper. Students can apply to study two out of four years at Cornell College and receive degrees from both institutions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has unveiled a plan to invite 50,000 young Americans to China over the next five years, although Chinese diplomats say a travel advisory issued by the US State Department has discouraged Americans from go to China.

Citing arbitrary detentions as well as exit bans that could prevent Americans from leaving the country, the State Department issued a Level 3 travel advisory — the second highest warning level — for mainland China. He urges Americans to “reconsider traveling” to China.

Some U.S. universities have suspended their programs in China due to the travel advisory.

Lin, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, said China had taken effective measures to protect the safety of foreigners. “We believe that this isolated incident will not disrupt normal cultural and human exchanges between the two countries,” he said.

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Tang reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press writer Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri, and Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas, contributed to this report.