The instinct to suppress grievances, from street level—where stone-faced security guards seize wreaths and tributes, and forcefully move along mourners—to social media, in which reports on the hundreds of violent outbursts that happen daily are heavily monitored for political commentary, has led to an almost-willful blindness among many Chinese, particularly a middle class vested in the status quo, about the thuggishness that perpetuates it. One particularly grim video, posted in June, shows a man in the city of Datong diligently hacking away at a middle-aged woman in broad daylight, until her scalp comes away on his cleaver blade. The victim, it emerged, was a “local tyrant” (tuhao) who had ordered goons to beat her neighbor for complaining about a leaky water pipe; bribed police to ignore his injuries, including a fractured eye socket and lost testicle; then insulted him, prompting the lethal backlash. With this information, a neighborhood atrocity became an act of vengeance that many deemed worthy of sympathy or approval.

The story was not widely reported, probably because the combination of corruption, callousness, and everyday brutality was far too close to the bone: The spendthrift offspring of rich businessmen and officials are known as tuhao, a word first coined to describe the kind of petty bully who terrorized their provincial fiefdoms before the Communists came and murdered them en masse. Censorship doesn’t always prevent information about incidents from leaking completely, but it does dilute and distill it, marginalizing the outrage away from mainstream opinion. The result is that, while those who diligently read the news may deplore the yawning chasm of moral vacuity and materialism they see, the general public is too stressed to care, too anaesthetized by the Party’s unstinting calls for “positive energy” to reckon with reality until it’s too late.

School slayings do still shock and appall, if briefly, but few will likely remember that, only a month ago, a 54-year-old man drove his SUV into a crowd in Hunan, got out and started stabbing victims indiscriminately (nine dead; 46 injured), or that, in April, a disgruntled ex-student killed five children and injured 12 in another school stabbing in Shaanxi, and, in June, another man killed two primary school pupils in Shanghai with a kitchen knife. These are certainly not incidents the government wants anyone considering, because, as Zhang Jing, a witness to the Chongqing incident, told CNN, much of everyday life is already “terrifying” for many: “The vaccines are faulty, the food is faulty... and right now even the security is problematic.”

Security was supposed to have been beefed-up nationwide in response to an extraordinary wave of school attacks that took place in 2010, beginning with the murder of eight children in Nanping. The attacker was executed within a month but, just hours after the sentence was carried out, another knifeman wounded 16 students. A day later, an unemployed man stabbed 28 schoolchildren. Four more attacks occurred over the following months, leaving 27 dead and 80 injured, and seemingly confirming fears that media reports would spur a wave of copycats. In the aftermath, the Minister of Education promised to deploy more security to protect schoolyards, with one guard guaranteed per school by 2013 (a ludicrous proposal, given the poverty and lack of resources that many schools suffer; neighbors of the Chongqing kindergarten said the school didn’t even have a playground and used a local park for exercises, a decision that proved a ghastly mistake).