Stabbing attacks on Americans in Jilin draw comparisons to Boxer Rebels

The killing of four instructors from Iowa's Cornell College in a park in Jilin has become the latest flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. A Chinese national who tried to intervene in the attack was also stabbed. An official statement on the attack released by Jilin local police was circumspect, with details of the attack itself scarce: “A Mr. Cui (male, 55, resident of Longtan District in Jilin) bumped into a stranger while walking in Beishan. Park, after which he stabbed the foreigner and three other foreigners with him, as well as a Chinese tourist who tried to intervene. Graphic images and videos of the aftermath of the attack circulated on X (formerly Twitter) before the incident was confirmed by local authorities. All five victims survived.

The incident initially attracted heavy censorship on the Chinese Internet. A hashtag about stabbing attacks was removed from Weibo “in accordance with applicable laws”. Search results for the hashtag “Jilin Beishan Park” also prioritized government-affiliated “Blue V” accounts, an indication of official censorship controls. State media outlets that published information on Weibo also shut down their comment sections. Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of state media tabloid Global Times, posted about the incident on Weibo hoping it was a “random” attack, but the post was later deleted.

At a press conference after the stabbing attacks, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry twice asserted that “China is one of the safest countries in the world”, while emphasizing that The attack was “random” and therefore should not disrupt relations between the United States and China. Lin's comment was met with skepticism on Weibo, where a number of people speculated that the attack was motivated by anti-foreign or anti-American sentiments encouraged by the government.:

渣浪的老爹：Divine fists, righteous and harmonious militia, foreign demons urge us to agitate China

自由落體2203：Don't everyone have to be anti-American?

一等恪靖侯：The result of anti-American propaganda.

範熠銘：A safe and healthy Dragon Boat Festival… right?

Joewong要凍檸走冰：The U-lock eventually became a dagger.

烈之驹：Why did the culprit carry a knife – how strange!

The picture :??? : Popular anti-Americanism.

Mio_兩儀：Is China really recognized globally as the safest country in the world?

慢慢趟吧：Using a dagger to stab people after being hit? Is he crazy?

痞子艾米纳姆：So we started killing foreign demons?

borain：The first thing I saw on YouTube today was a report about this. At present, many foreign “China Travel” netizens are completely panicked. [Chinese]

Xi Jinping claims a special relationship with Iowa, which he first visited in 1985 as a member of an agricultural delegation from Hebei. Chinese state media often highlight its ties to the state. In 2016, Donald Trump chose former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, whom the Department of Foreign Affairs hailed as an “old friend of the Chinese people,” as his ambassador to China. (The story is not all rosy, however: A suburban home in Muscatine, Iowa, which had been transformed into a museum to commemorate Xi's relations with China, has now fallen into disrepair.) In January of This year, the People's Daily published an open letter written by Xi Jinping to Sarah Lande, the compiler of the book “Old Friends: The Xi Jinping-Iowa Story,” encouraging American students to visit China. The stabbings of Iowa educators — even if completely random — potentially complicate these narratives.

After restrictions on writing about the incident were lifted on the Chinese internet, a number of writers have reflected on what they see as a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Chinese society. At the forefront of these thoughts were comparisons to the Boxer Rebellion, a crusade against Westerners and Chinese Christians launched by villagers in northern China in the late 1890s and early 1900s. was suppressed by the Eight Nations Alliance, a multinational military coalition that included the United States. The Alliance remains controversial in China. After US Secretary of State Tony Blinken had a fiery meeting with Yang Jiechi in Anchorage, Alaska in 2021 – the first interface between the PRC and the Biden administration – a meme comparing Blinken to diplomats linked to the Alliance is went viral on Weibo. A similar meme also went viral following the 2021 G7 summit, similarly drawing comparisons between modern diplomats and those involved in crushing the Boxer Rebellion. Yet many in China view the rebellion itself with concern. On WeChat, blogger @关尔东 (@guāněrdōng) wrote an essay titled “The 'Patriotism' of the Boxers is One I Cannot Stand”:

History reveals that the Boxers killed many of their countrymen, all because of their own confusing standards.

According to Yang Diangao's “Gengzi Archives”: “After all the churches and missionary businesses were burned, all the shops in and around the city that bore foreign signs or carried foreign goods were also destroyed or left be looted. by the poor. Orders were issued prohibiting any family from owning foreign property or lighting foreign lamps. Families poured their kerosene into the streets and abandoned their [foreign] coolers and buckets. Then a rumor began to circulate that after all the missionaries and [Christian] If converts had been killed, all students who read foreign books would also be executed. This caused panic among the students and everyone who had foreign books burned them.

“Records of the Boxers” states: “A family of eight was killed simply because they had a box of [foreign] matches.”

Excuse me, but what did these people do wrong? Reading a foreign book – or even just having a box of matches lying around – led to Boxer violence. Where is the justice in this?

[…] Isn’t their “patriotism” a little unhealthy?

[…] What interests me most is why the “Chinese tourist who tried to stop the attacker” was also stabbed.

I will always maintain that anyone, no matter how “patriotic,” who can mercilessly attack an innocent countryman is someone to be feared. “Righteous” is a word that can never be used to describe them. [Chinese]

Others have linked it to recent instances of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The WeChat account 麟阁经略 (@língéjīnglüè) wrote that the stabbings are the product of indulgence in these past incidents:

Some people in this world harbor hatred that they learned in unfamiliar places. They express their dissatisfaction with life on innocent people who cross their path. Moreover, they think they are being righteous and courageous in doing so.

What if this wasn't just an isolated, random incident, but rather a long-standing climate of fear and hatred? Beatings of people wearing kimonos, threats on Weibo to blow up the German embassy, ​​false claims that the sun illustrations are references to the Japanese imperial flag, harassment of readers of foreign poetry as “slaves to all that who is Western”… there has been too much tolerance for incidents like these. [Chinese]

The WeChat account @无声无光 (@wúshēngwúguāng) drew grim comparison by linking xenophobic comments targeting American professor in Shanghai to Jilin attack:

The fact is that these xenophobic sentiments are on the rise. In early May, during an international academic conference hosted by Fudan University, an octogenarian American academic was insulted by a security guard at Fudan Crown Plaza for moving his luggage too slowly while taking a taxi. The security guard told him, “Don't think [you can get away with this] just because you're American! A friend of mine told me that these two incidents are similar in nature: it's just that in Jilin they used a knife. [Chinese]

Another potential source of unrest in U.S.-China relations is Friday's revelation of a covert Pentagon operation aimed at sowing distrust of Chinese vaccines in the Philippines and other countries. The Reuters report that exposed the campaign presents it as retaliation for Chinese efforts to portray the United States as the source of the pandemic. In deliberately discouraging vaccination at a time when thousands were dying, a former State Department official said, “We are lower than the Chinese and we should not do this.” »