Dangerous minds

By He Na (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-27 09:42

Student Li Qilong tore open the envelope and scanned the letter inside. It was the news he'd been dreading - he'd flunked his exams and was being booted out of college.

If he wasn't already at rock bottom, he was soon afterwards when his father heard the news and lay into him with a vengeance.

It was more than he could take. He grabbed a kitchen knife, broke into an office at his college, Beijing University of Technology, and repeatedly stabbed a woman named Xu, who worked in the office that had sent out the notices. She would certainly have died but for other teachers hearing her screams and rushing to her rescue.

They pulled Li off her and as they tended to their wounded colleague he fled the scene and tried to kill himself by jumping from a 4-m-high overpass on the campus.

Miraculously, he survived and was rushed to Chaoyang Hospital ... in the same ambulance as the teacher he had just stabbed, who by then was in a critical condition.

Li, 21, was treated in an adjacent room.

Even as he arrived at hospital in great pain, Li still refused treatment and tried to pull out the blood transfusion tube. He only calmed down after his father arrived.

Today, 11 days later, Xu is still in intensive care, with multiple wounds to her chest, belly and other parts of her body. Doctors from the ICU ward say her condition is now stable and she is out of danger.

Li is also still in hospital, albeit with only a broken arm and broken rib.

The brutal attack happened on Monday last week, three days before the new semester.

Li was a senior student in the university's Environment and Energy Industry College. His father later admitted he saw red when he saw the notice to quit. "I was very angry and scolded my son with some strict words that lunchtime," he said.

Police say the motive for the attack is still unclear but the letter was undoubtedly the key factor. "I won't live if I have to quit school," Li was heard to say from his hospital bed.

This incident is just the latest in a long list of recent attacks on teachers and school staff, mostly by their students. The increasing frequency of such cases has prompted concern about the growing tension between students and teachers, and some students' fragile psychological condition.

It is an alarming situation, especially in China, where the Confucian doctrine has held sway for 2,500 years. Reverence for one's teachers and the importance of education were the backbone of Confucianism.

If the teacher Xu was an unlucky victim, she was at least better off than Cheng Chunming, a professor at Beijing's University of Political Science and Law.

Suspecting that his girlfriend had had an affair with Professor Cheng, 22-year-old senior Fu Chengli stabbed Cheng to death with a kitchen knife in October last year. Then he used a mobile phone to surrender after the killing. The university said his behavior had always been normal and he had never shown any sign of mental illness. He had won a place at the university with high exam marks. Cheng's wife was five months' pregnant when he was killed.

The above stories are examples of more than 20 cases of students assaulting teachers in China over the last two years.

Experts have noted a growing trend for such attacks to be carried out by younger students. On Oct 4, last year, for instance, 17-year-old student Li Ming was apparently so unhappy with his head teacher, Hao Xudong, that he stabbed him to death in a classroom at Shuozhou Middle School in Shanxi province.

"I thought being a teacher was the safest job in the world, so why has it become such a high-risk one?" says Luo Jing, a middle school teacher from Changchun, Jilin province.

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