DEADLY SCHOOL ATTACKS IN CHINA DEADLY SCHOOL ATTACKS IN CHINA China has witnessed a series of assaults by knife-wielding attackers on schools in recent years. Many have been blamed on personal grudges or people with psychiatric problems: April 30, 2010: A farmer attacked and injured five kindergarten students with a hammer in Shandong province's Weifang city before burning himself to death. The man struck a teacher who tried to block him and then used the hammer to attack the children. None of the children had life-threatening injuries. April 29, 2010: A 47-year-old unemployed man attacked a classroom of 4-year-olds at a kindergarten in Jiangsu province, wounding 28 of them. Two teachers and a security guard were also hurt. April 28, 2010: A man wielding a knife broke into a primary school in Leizhou city in Guangdong province in southern China and stabbed 18 students and a teacher. April 12, 2010: Yang Jiaqin, 40, hacked to death a second grader and an elderly woman near an elementary school in Xizhen village of the southern Guangxi region. The attack came one day before Yang's family was scheduled to send him to a hospital for psychological treatment. He had been diagnosed with a mood disorder. March 23, 2010: Zheng Minsheng, 42, killed eight children in a knife attack at the Nanping Experimental Elementary School in south China's Fujian province. Zheng was executed April 28. March 2, 2009: Xu Ximei, 40, hacked two preschoolers, aged 4 and 6, to death with a kitchen knife and injured three other children and a grandmother at a primary school in Mazhan, a village in Guangdong province, and at a yard in the village. Xu was believed to be mentally disabled. Feb. 24, 2008: Chen Wenzhen, a former student at the Leizhou No. 2 Middle School in Guangdong province, stabbed to death a boy and a girl, then killed himself. Chen had dropped out half a year earlier because he suffered from headaches and could not concentrate on his studies, state media said. June, 2007: A man state media identified only by his surname, Su, broke into the Chiling Primary School in Longtang township in Guangdong and killed a 9-year-old boy with a kitchen knife. Three other students were seriously wounded. The attacker had been seen quarreling with the boy's parents in the past. May 24, 2006: Yang Xinlong hacked a neighbor to death in the village of Luoying in central China's Henan province, then took 19 elementary school students hostage and killed one before police subdued him. Yang was hospitalized after police shot him when he refused to surrender. Nov. 25, 2004: Yan Yiming, 21, broke into a Chinese high school dormitory and stabbed nine boys to death in Ruzhou, Henan province. Yan's mother turned him in to police after he attempted suicide on the day following the attack. He was executed two months later. Aug. 4, 2004: Xu Heping, 51, a part-time gatekeeper at a Beijing kindergarten killed one student and slashed 14 others and three teachers. State media said at the time Xu had a history of schizophrenia. The attack, near the compound where President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders live and work, prompted the government to order stepped up security at schools nationwide. -- The Associated Press BEIJING (AP)  A knife-wielding man allegedly attacked a kindergarten class of 4-year-olds in eastern China on Thursday, slashing 28 children in what an expert said was a copycat rampage of two other episodes at Chinese schools in the past month. A 47-year-old jobless man, Xu Yuyuan, burst into a classroom at the Zhongxin Kindergarten early Thursday, waving an eight-inch knife and stabbing a security guard who tried to stop him, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Five students were in critical condition following the attack in Jiangsu province's Taixing city and two teachers and the security guard were injured, said Zhu Guiming, an official with the Taixing propaganda department. A series of school attacks in China in recent years have mostly been blamed on people with personal grudges or suffering from mental illness, leading to calls for improved security. China's inadequate mental health network has left millions of unstable people without the help they need. Many otherwise healthy Chinese also feel frustrated and powerless because they aren't able to adapt to the constant social upheaval and because they believe the changes favor the corrupt. That kind of anger has occasionally erupted in mass violence and in isolated attacks. It is not known why schools are targeted. On Wednesday, a teacher on sick leave due to mental illness broke into a primary school in Guangdong province's Leizhou city in southern China and wounded 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack, police say. That attack came on the same day a man was executed for killing eight children last month in stabbings that shocked China. WEDNESDAY: Police: Teacher wounds 15 students, 1 teacher in China It was not known if Xu knew about the previous day's attack in Guangdong, but Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said these sorts of violent attacks often happen in clusters because one may trigger copycat attacks. "It's like suicide, which is another type of mental health problem that can spread in a community," said Zhou. "Normally, with these kind of violent events we hope the media won't blow them up too much. Because that tends to make it spread." A survey of mental health in four Chinese provinces jointly done by Chinese and U.S. doctors that was published in the Lancet in June concluded that China likely had about 173 million adults nationwide with mental health disorders and that most, 158 million, had never gotten any professional help for their problems. But state media said Zheng Minsheng, 42, had no history of mental illness before he rampaged through a school in Fujian province in March, killing eight children. During his trial, Zheng said he killed the children because he had been upset after being jilted by a woman and treated badly by her wealthy family. The court also heard that Zheng lived with his 80-year-old grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment and slept on the balcony in summer and in the living room in winter. He testified that he had trouble dealing with people at work but had not gotten the help he needed from his boss, so he quit his job but was unable to find another one. Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has said China's sweeping social changes might be partially to blame for Zheng's anti-social rage. "A social environment lacking fairness and justice, in which those who abide by the rules gain nothing, while those who do not can profit, could bring about resistance by the weak against the entire society," Yu was quoted as saying by the Southern Weekly newspaper a few weeks after the attack. Zheng was executed Wednesday, just weeks after his crime. Zhou, the Renmin University professor, said China's use of capital punishment helps fuel the cycle of violence by enforcing a belief in "blood for blood." He said China should abolish the death penalty, improve human rights and make its justice system more fair and transparent. After a 2004 attack at a school in Beijing that left nine students dead, the central government mandated tighter school security nationwide. The Ministry of Education did not immediately respond to a fax Thursday asking whether the attacks would result in orders to step up school security. In Wednesday's attack, in which a teacher allegedly stabbed fourth- and fifth-graders in their heads, backs and arms, Xinhua said the suspect suffered from mental illness and had been on sick leave from another school since February 2006. He is now in police custody. None of the victims in that case had life-threatening wounds, said the director of the command center at the Leizhou Public Security Bureau, who gave his name as Qin. Two weeks ago, police say a mentally ill man hacked to death a second-grader and an elderly woman with a meat cleaver in southern Guangxi and wounded five other people. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. 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