Kindergarten Killings

I have been waiting for this story to pop up on the German news, and even on the China-Blogs I read it took quite a while to emerge, so I feel compelled to ask - how come we always hear about school massacres in the US, Canada or Germany (yes, we had a couple of those, too), but five Kindergarten or Primary School attacks in China within just one months go unnoticed?（I have to give the British, Canadian and US media some credit, I could find news about it there, but I doubt it made it to the front pages?) Possibly it's because the Chinese government put sufficient pressure on the media to hush this up, no need to disturb the Expo-opening extravaganza... Or do we consider China such an "uncivilized" country that this isn't worth mentioning? Have Westerners exhausted their China-compassion with the most recent earthquake? Not schoolchildren again, please! Give us some news variety, like say, the Greek financial disaster! (Do people really care about this as much as the German media makes one believe?)

The spreading of these news in China was something I could witness first hand - only a couple of hours after the assault in Taixing, Jiangsu (our province), my Chinese teacher got an SMS and was visibly shocked. She told us the story in class. The next day she was still so moved she had to wipe tears from her eyes (she has a son in kindergarten age). I think it is easy to underestimate the availability of news in China, because it doesn't follow the same channels that we are used to. And there are still too few people who monitor the Chinese interwebs and translate articles for ignorants like me. Of course, this inofficial online and cell phone news culture comes at the risk of inaccuracy and lots of rumors. But I think it works better than we give the Chinese credit for. No wonder one of my Chinese friends back in Montreal acted offended when I asked him "Do you actually get those news in China?" (about the Urumqi unrest last year) - my apologies :)

Hats off to China Geeks, really highly recommended if you want to learn about China but cannot read any Chinese. It is very sino-phil, yes, because the people who write/translate for this website have chosen to live here and are not professional reporters, but I think they live up to some standard of objectivity.