car collision in front of a school, “many” children injured

A car collision outside a school in central China's Hunan province caused “many” injured among the children, state television CCTV reported. “Many schoolchildren were injured, the precise toll is under investigation”said CCTV on Tuesday, November 19. The events took place outside a primary school in Changde, a city in central China with some five million inhabitants.

State television did not indicate whether the collision was intentional or not. The driver, a 39-year-old man identified only by his last name, Huang, was taken into custody, police said. Videos shared on Chinese social media, where the school appears, appear to show the scene just after the accident, with panicked children running and many injured people on the ground. In another, we see a bleeding man being beaten by passers-by while he lies on the ground next to an off-road car.

A country unaccustomed to violent incidents

Many videos on the subject published on social networks appear on Tuesday to have already been removed from these tightly controlled platforms. The collision quickly became one of the most discussed topics on Chinese social media, with some 95 million views accumulated on the Weibo platform as of 11:10 a.m. (0310 GMT). China was the scene last week of several deadly attacks on isolated individuals. “How can something like this still happen?”regretted a Weibo user on Tuesday after the collision in Changde.

On November 11, a 62-year-old man drove an SUV into people who were exercising outside at a sports complex in Zhuhai, southern Guangdong province, causing 35 dead and around forty injured. The authorities took almost 24 hours to communicate the results of this attack. Videos of the events also became inaccessible after their publication. This is the worst killing in recent years in China, a country unaccustomed to violent incidents of this scale. The first elements of the investigation suggest that the driver may have committed his act due to “his dissatisfaction with the division of property following his divorce”according to police.

On Saturday, a knife attack in a school in the east of the country, perpetrated by a former student, left eight dead and 17 injured. According to the first elements of the investigation, the suspect is a 21-year-old man, student of the class of 2024, who failed to obtain his diploma and “came back to school to express his anger and commit these murders”according to police in Yixing (east).