China, safe for foreigners despite isolated stabbing incident with US instructors, says Beijing
A 55-year-old man has been taken into custody in connection with the attack, but his motives have not been disclosed. Any reference to the case has been blocked on Chinese social media. Xi Jinping is betting heavily on cultural exchanges to ease geopolitical tensions with the United States, but fewer than 900 Americans are currently studying in China against 290,000 Chinese in the United States.
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – A 55-year-old man named Cui was arrested in the northeastern Chinese province of Jilin for stabbing four US computer science instructors yesterday in a park.
The four were in China on a cultural exchange programme between Cornell College, in Iowa, and its partner institution, Beihua University.
A Chinese man who tried to defend the four foreigners was also injured in the attack.
A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry said today that the injured were taken to hospital for treatment and that no one was in critical condition.
Chinese authorities did not provide any information on what motivated the attacker's gesture, except to say this "isolated incident will not disrupt normal cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.”
In the meantime, the authorities quickly blocked news of the attack posted on social media coming from foreign sources, since the "incident" had not been reported in the Chinese media.
A hashtag that referred to the incident was also blocked.
Generally, Chinese social media are increasingly filled with nationalist rhetoric nurturing xenophobic attitudes.
The issue of cultural exchanges with the United States is a particularly sensitive issue in China.
In the latest high-level contacts between the two countries, China focused heavily on such exchanges to ease tensions on trade and geopolitical disputes like Taiwan, the South China Sea, or the war in Ukraine.
Recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a plan to invite 50,000 young Americans to China over the next five years.
But such a project found an obstacle in the US State Department, which issued a Level 3 travel advisory to China warning of possible arbitrary detention and exit bans.
For this reason, some US universities began scaling back on cooperation with Chinese institutions at the end of the lockdown imposed by the pandemic.
According to data cited by Reuters, fewer than 900 Americans are currently studying in China, compared to more than 290,000 Chinese in the United States.
Still, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that "China is widely considered as one of the safest countries in the world,” noting that the authorities will take “effective measures to protect the safety of all foreign nationals in China.”
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