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China's School Killings. Capitalism Made Me Do It.

By Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson

Since China's recent spate of school killings, I have received a couple emails asking me "what is going on." I respond by saying I have no clue. I do not explain any further, but if I did, I would say that for me to have any idea as to causation, I would have to know a helluva (that's a word among the 21 and under set) lot more than I do about each of the killings and real information on that sort of thing does not usually come out until years later when someone writes a book on it. I would also have said that I very much doubt that the reasons for the various killings are related and that in all of those cases, no doubt, there were multiple reasons. In other words, it is complicated. But why deal in nuance when you can use tragedy to advance your own thesis? At least that seems to be the thinking of Mary Nicks Moody who, in a recent post, entitled, "Recent Violence in China - A Reflection of Income Inequalities," confidently proclaims that the killings are due to China's rising income inequalities:

The shocking incident inspired four copycat killing sprees by unemployed or under-employed adult males, most of whom reportedly suffered from mental illness. The killings highlight the need for a better social safety net and social welfare services for the mentally ill, and put into sharp focus the uneven nature of China's economic development and its concomitant social pressures.

The New York Times (who else?) did the same thing with the Times Square bomber, penning an article trying to convince us that it was financial difficulties, not jihadi fanaticism that caused Faisal Shahzad to seek to bomb as many as he could into oblivion. The underlying theme of all these "my finances made me do it" stories seems to be that if we only had more redistribution of wealth, these sorts of things would be avoided. The problem with this argument is that it has absolutely no basis in reality as there is no evidence of which I am aware in either the United States or in China showing a correlation between murders (particularly multiple murders) and income inequality. The other flaw in these arguments is that they completely fail to explain why billions of people (in the United State and in China and elsewhere) who are struggling to make ends meet do not just go off and engage in a multiple murder. I grew up in a very working class neighborhood in a very working class city in Michigan and the thing I really hate about the if you aren't rich you are at risk of becoming a multiple murderer theme is that it is so incredibly condescending. Guess what Ms. Moody, I know just a ton of people who are constantly struggling economically and I have no worries about them going off and whacking a bunch of people. In fact, call me naive, but I see them as no more likely to do such a thing than someone with an Ivy League master's degree. I virtually never attack other writings on China, but this one registered so high on the BS meter that it angered me so much that I could not resist. We deserve better than this. What do you think?

Full post as published by China Law Blog on May 19, 2010 (boomark / email).