BEIJING - A man buys a knife in a Beijing supermarket and randomly attacks customers with it, including a baby; another steals a knife from a roadside snack bar and starts attacking passersby; a third gets into an argument with a woman, picks her 2-year-old girl out of her stroller and smashes her baby to the ground, killing her.

A spate of deadly knife attacks and other apparently random acts of violence in the past few days - many of them in the capital - has rattled the Chinese government and has many Chinese citizens wondering loudly what is becoming of their society.

Police officers survey the scene after a man in a wheelchair set off a homemade bomb at Beijing Airport..

Some incidents seem to have had political overtones. A disabled man in a wheelchair who detonated a homemade bomb in Beijing's airport on July 20 was apparently protesting because he had been beaten and paralyzed by security guards many years before and his complaints had been ignored.

Another who rushed into a Family Planning Bureau in Guangxi province and killed two officials last week may have been unhappy because the office, which is in charge of enforcing China's controversial one-child policy, had refused to register the birth of his fourth daughter, according to media reports.