Dark thoughts

It hasn't taken long for the opening night optimism of these Olympics to be soured by tragedy. An American tourist was murdered by a (seemingly) crazed assailant with a knife at lunchtime yesterday. His wife and his female Chinese tour guide were both also seriously hurt in the attack. Their daughter, said to have been with them at the time but uninjured, was a member of the US volleyball team at the Athens Olympics, and is married to the current men's volleyball coach. Full story here.

This is particularly shocking to me because it happened in such familiar territory - in the ancient Drum Tower, a famous historic monument in my neighbourhood, less than a mile from where I live, a place I have often visited myself and walk past almost every day.

One of my journalist friends sent me the news at the beginning of Saturday evening, just after the first reports had started to appear on the Internet. It was, inevitably, the only topic of conversation last night.

Almost more disturbing than the appalling crime itself is the 'conspiracy theory' explanation of it, a theory being put forward by a couple of Chinese I spoke to about it last night. They seem convinced that this was not just the action of a lone madman but a paid 'hit' - and that it could be the first in a whole series of such assaults.

I am deeply sceptical of this theory, and suspect that it is merely a knee-jerk rejection of the 'official line' being so vigorously peddled, i.e. that this was just a random incident, that the attacker did not know who his victims were, could scarcely even have known their nationality, much less their connection to the US Olympic team.

However, I was unsettled by the passion and confidence with which the idea was advanced, and it did draw me into speculations of my own. How might such a conspiracy work? Well, 50,000RMB is more than your average white-collar worker earns in a year, more than a low-paid worker earns in several years, more than most people can save in half a lifetime. I imagine that quite a few people in this country would consider carrying out a murder for such a figure, perhaps less; it's an amount that would set a poor man's family up quite nicely, and might well be viewed by the desperate as an adequate compensation for the sacrifice of their own life (this attacker jumped from the Tower to his death; but there is no way he could have evaded capture, speedy trial, and execution). 1,000,000RMB will thus buy you a lot of mayhem, a lot of suicide attacks in this country. And 1,000,000RMB is small change for a lot of China's nouveaux riches industrialists.

So, the mechanics of such a plot are all too horribly plausible. But the question remains why anyone would want to do something like this. Well, alas, for many Chinese, the fenqing tendency, misguided nationalism (and the associated hatred of America) might be reason enough. However, you also have to wonder if there might not be just pride but money invested in the outcome of these Olympics: is there some serious sports betting going on about the final medal tally, and whether China can edge America out of the top spot? Now, if there were, perhaps that could provide a motivation for a sequence of such attacks. I don't think you'd have to try to target the likeliest medal winners. The psychological impact of such a campaign would surely undermine the collective performance of America's sportsmen here. Indeed, it might not take very many more such attacks - whether fatal or not - to make Team USA consider withdrawing from competition altogether.

Forgive these miserable ruminations. It's wise to consider all possibilities, and to be a little extra wary after an event like this. But my gut feeling is that the 'conspiracy theory' propounded last night is preposterous. I think the Chinese simply don't understand mental illness very well, aren't so familiar as us with the phenomenon of the random killer, and have become conditioned to suppose that there must be a financial motivation for everything.

There is supposedly a proverb (although I've only ever encountered it in Goldfinger, so I wonder if Ian Fleming didn't invent it himself): "Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; the third time, it's enemy action."

I really want to believe that this incident was just a one-off. But if something like this happens again, I'll be very alarmed. And if there are three such attacks, I'll start to consider staying indoors for the rest of the month.

However, I don't think that's going to happen. Psycho killers crop up all over the world (after all, it's only a week or so since that horrific attack on the Greyhound bus in Canada), and it's just very unfortunate timing for China that this should have happened at the beginning of the Olympics.

Nevertheless, I have three final observations to make:

1) This was arguably a failure of the Olympic security arrangements.

I have long been complaining that the huge numbers of bodies - police, military, neighbourhood volunteers - put out on the streets is largely empty show. Are they actually watchful? Would any of them notice or be concerned by a twitchy-looking guy with the handle of a knife sticking out of his waistband? I fear not.

And while we have had bag checks and X-ray scanners introduced at all the Olympic venues and subway stations, the major tourist sites have been overlooked. Why??

2) China has a worryingly large number of crazies.

The pace of change and constant social upheaval here create huge stress, both for urban and rural dwellers. Yet there is very little support network for people with psychological problems, very little understanding of or sympathy for them even within the medical profession. Not only does China have a huge population, but it has, I think, a far higher proportion of mentally unwell people than almost any other country. In my few years teaching at Universities here, I encountered several dangerously disturbed young people, who were apparently getting no psychiatric help at all.

3) Even crazy people need a 'reason' to do something.

There's a lot of warmth and openness amongst the Chinese people towards foreigners, but it coexists with a lot of suspicion and resentment. State propaganda exploits the notion of the external 'enemy' to bolster national unity; most of the Western powers (and India and Russia and Japan and South Korea and....) are part of that 'enemy' to a greater or lesser extent, but America is pretty consistently Enemy No 1. This knife-wielding maniac may not have known who he was attacking, but I'm pretty sure he chose to vent his anger on them because he thought they were American.

You reap what you sow. The Chinese government has been planting the seeds of this kind of hatred for so many years now, it really shouldn't be surprised when an incident like this happens.

If there are further attacks of this kind, it will be, I think, not because of the machinations of some evil dakuan, but simply because there are a lot of crazed, angry, desperate people here who have been taught since childhood to blame everything on foreigners.