Late last year, three mass attacks in Red China made headlines. On November 11, 2024, a man drove into a crowd killing 35 and injuring 43. On November 16, a student with a knife stabbed people at a vocational school killing 8, wounding 17. On November 19, another driver injured 30 driving into a crowd at an elementary school.
The Associated Press reported that “China’s leader Xi Jinping wants the recent spree of mass killings that shocked the country not to happen again. He ordered local governments to prevent future ‘extreme cases.’ ”
But local government is going to do whatever it’s going to do. It may even be sitting on news of more of these incidents.
A structural problem
The problem is structural. As one consultancy says, “Controlling crime is one metric by which [local] officials’ performance is evaluated, so there is an incentive to underreport or misreport crime of all kinds. For instance, research by Borge Bakken of Australia National University found that 97.5% of all crimes in Guangzhou were not included in official statistics.”
So mass attacks may be other than what is publicized, and ordinary crime figures should be highly suspect. With local suppression and misreporting, no one at the top will have a true picture. Result: absurd crime statistics. In 2023, the official murder rate was 0.46 cases per 100,000 population. By comparison, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime showed Norway at .55, Sweden at 1.1, and the U.S. at 6.38 (each in 2022).
“The government of the People’s Republic of China does not release exact unified statistics on crime rates and the rate of criminal offending due to such information being considered politically and socially sensitive,” Wikipedia notes. The few official statistics that do get released “are the subject of much academic debate due to allegations of statistical fabrication, underreporting and corruption.”
Someone on Reddit put it more eloquently: “You won’t see an actual true piece of data from the CCP ever mate.”
The larger question is one of both a criminal state and the non-state criminals allowed to operate within it. No one is greenlighting stabbings and cars ramming pedestrians. But apart from the crimes committed by the Party and state, semi-official crime and privately organized crime are rampant.
Kinds of crime
The Organized Crime Index, worth quoting at length, gives us an idea of the extent and nature of the crime.
OCI: “China is a source, transit, and destination country for human trafficking.”
In the words of our State Department, “The Government of the People’s Republic of China does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.”
OCI: “Children of foreign families and those with developmental disabilities are victims of forced labor and forced begging.”
Forced begging means that the beggars must split their meagre earnings with a boss. Forced labor means slavery.
OCI: “Chinese nationals are exploited in Chinese projects abroad…”
Axios says: “Chinese laborers working on Chinese state-funded infrastructure projects abroad may be subject to deceptive job ads, passport retention, wage withholding, physical violence and lack of contracts.”
OCI: “…and foreign fishermen are exploited in China’s distant water fleet.”
The Environmental Justice Foundation asserts that “China’s distant water fleet—by far the world’s largest—is rife with human rights abuses.”
OCI: China engages in “organ trafficking and the falsification of travel documents.”
“The Chinese Communist Party has a long track record of human rights violations stemming from illegal organ harvesting in their own country,” says Florida Congressman Neal Dunn, who has introduced the Block Organ Transplant Purchases from China Act.
OCI: “China is a significant participant in the global market for human smuggling. Chinese nationals are smuggled to and through South East Asia and further to North America, Europe, and other parts of the world.”
As early as the 1990s, Chinese organized crime had “developed human smuggling into a truly global business, shepherding some one hundred thousand people per year to a range of destinations including Japan, Canada, Australia, the United States, France, Holland, and other parts of Europe. Profits from the Chinese smuggling network are reported to be in the range of $3.1 billion U.S. per year.”
OCI: “Counterfeit goods have a long history in China, and the country is currently the world’s major source for these items.”
China Observer reports authentic details of the fakery in its video “Counterfeiting in China Runs Wild: Selling Fakes Worldwide as Genuine Products”
OCI: “Chinese actors, including criminal groups and independent offenders, are heavily involved in mining activities in various countries, some of which are illegal.”
For instance, “There are more than 450 mining companies in the South Kivu Province” of the Democratic Republic of Congo, “mostly run by Chinese nationals; but unfortunately, they are operating illegally due to a lack of compliance with current Congolese mining codes.”
Lawlessness and corruption are a breeding ground for crime. The communists have the reporting of “ordinary” crime well under control. Expect that they will soon have the reporting of “extreme” crime similarly suppressed. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
