• March 23: Unemployed community surgeon Zheng Minsheng attacks elementary school students with a knife in Nanping, Fujian, killing eight.
• April 9: Certified psychiatric patient hacks to death a grandmother and a student outside the gate of a school in Hepu, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
• April 28: The same day that Zheng Minsheng is executed, Chen Kangbing, a former teacher, wounds 18 students in an elementary school in Leizhou, Guangdong.
• April 29: Unemployed local Xu Yuyuan wounds 29 children, two teachers, and a security guard with a meat cleaver in a kindergarten in Taizhou, Jiangsu.
• April 30: Farmer Wang Yonglai rides a motorcycle through the gate of a school in Weifang, Shandong, and injures five students before setting himself on fire.

The recent spate of school stabbings across China is further evidence of the increasingly desperate attempts by the downtrodden to draw attention to China’s vast income gap. While Zheng Minsheng, the perpetrator of the Nanping stabbing, appears to have acted independently, the subsequent rash of attacks have the unmistakable whiff of the copycat. While it may seem crass to label these grisly incidents as a case of follow-the-leader, the international media seem unable to come to any more satisfying conclusion.

Yes, all of these men were poor. Yes, all were unemployed or unhappy in their jobs. Some, such as Zheng Minsheng, had reportedly failed in relationships, others may have been mentally disturbed. Their life histories have a million parallels in China’s developed regions, where the rich are filthy rich and the poor are filthy poor. With the exception of the Hepu attack, all of these men lived in China’s success-story provinces, the industrial and economic heartlands across the eastern coast. However, their low status placed them at the very bottom of an income-based pecking order. They were the least consequential of the inconsequential—unmarried, unemployed, too young to be respected and too old to be hopeful for change. These were men who’d played the game of life and lost out, just a handful of the many casualties of rampant capitalism and China’s wholesale sell-off of the “iron rice bowl.”  And so they should have remained—forgotten, overlooked, the kind of men nobody thinks about, much less talks about.

However, every single one of these men became infamous overnight, their names bounced between chatrooms and blogs, their deeds told and retold in grisly detail and with much head-shaking by people across the length and breadth of the world’s most populous nation. Nobodies one day, arch-villains the next. There is little doubt that every one of them (apart from Wang Yonglai, who died from his injuries) will receive the treatment meted out to Zheng Minsheng—a swift conviction and a bullet to the back of the head. Considering the miserable lives they all led, priced out of their own housing, jobless, unmarried, and generally hopeless, this seems like the best kind of euthanasia. Suicide paid for and carried out by the nation’s alarmingly efficient system of capital punishment. No lengthy death-row languishing, no protracted Amnesty-led appeals. These men all wanted to be caught in the act.

Why? Well, we only have to look at the grassroots response to see that all of these men have gained immortality through notoriety. For mere minutes of effort, they have gained fame to rival that of most mid-level pop stars, and also a permanent solution to their personal problems. Even China’s top blogger Han Han is talking about them. Perhaps it was just a rumor that one of Zheng Minsheng’s disgruntled neighbors, an elderly woman who later presented a petition to reporters warning that poverty and anonymity would drive others to follow his example, told the Nanping killer to “do something horrifying. You’ll be remembered for it.” However, this rumor seems to illustrate with horrific accuracy the thought that may have occurred to a middle-aged, unemployed, unmarried man reduced to sleeping on his parents’ balcony.

It’s the same story for all the subsequent perpetrators. Their crimes are being studied and analyzed by psychiatrists, their mental states pored over by media and netizens. Their names have become synonymous with the problems created by China’s income gap. They have sent shockwaves through the country, with parents turning out in droves to drop off and collect their children from school—children who, a few weeks before, were trusted to walk or cycle anything up to several miles by themselves to school every day. Their crimes have called attention to the plight of China’s countless, faceless, unemployed, unmarried, and unsatisfied. The Internet has prevented the government from concealing their crimes, though some have cast doubt on the zero body counts of the Leizhou, Taizhou and Weifang attacks as government spin. Indeed, the Internet has been these criminals’ largest source of publicity.

Maybe China’s impotent majority, long denied solutions to some of China’s biggest problems, have found the perfect way to make their voices heard. They face a selectively deaf media, a winner-takes-all social race, a massive gender imbalance and an insurmountable income gap. Perhaps the Western media have been too quick to sneer at China’s official labeling of these crimes as “one-person terrorism.” They have inspired fear and unsettled society and made themselves known to the world with a single action. Is that not the motive of every terrorist? What sets these men apart from suicide bombers? In China, committing a murder in open view of dozens of witnesses then allowing yourself to be caught is suicide. And for those who decry these men’s failure to find another outlet for their grievances against the society that they feel rejected them, please offer up a situation in which these men would be listened to. Even China’s Internet rumor-mill is dominated by the loudest, most eloquent voices. The beautiful, the smart, the well-educated, the well-connected, and, above all, the wealthy, have a public voice in China. That’s where it stops.

Denied a niche, these men have created one. And the victims, as is so often the case, are the innocent. With the places at the top already filled, there’s plenty of room at the bottom.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Another stabbing occurred yesterday morning, May 12. From the Telegraph: “Wu Huanmin, 48, broke into a nursery school in Hanzhong city, in northern Shaanxi province, soon after 8am on Wednesday. Officials say Wu killed himself after murdering seven children and two adults, and wounding 11 other children, two severely. The motive for the attack was not immediately clear. Chinese censors quickly removed any mention of the attack from the internet and banned the story from the main state television news broadcast, possibly fearing more copycat attacks.”