How conspiracy theories might have led to assault on Japanese mother and son in China

The son goes to a local Japanese school. On Chinese social media, unfounded rumors and espionage accusations against these schools are barely hard to find.

A knife attack in Suzhou, China injured three on Monday. Two of the victims were a Japanese mother and her child. The third was a Chinese woman who tried to block the attacker.

The incident took place at a bus stop, where the two Japanese victims were waiting for a school bus that would take them to a local Japanese school. After injuring the two, the attacker tried to get on the bus and was blocked by the Chinese victim who was on the bus.

According to Suzhou police, the Chinese woman is still in serious condition and requires intensive rescue. The police said that the suspect, who was arrested at the scene, is an unemployed 52-year-old man who is not a local resident.

The attacker’s motivation remains unclear. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that it was an isolated incident, which was also what Beijing said after four American visitors were assaulted by a Chinese man with a knife in northeastern China earlier this month.

While it’s not a secret that anti-Japanese sentiment runs rampant on Chinese social media and among certain sections of the Chinese public due to historical conflicts, including wars, territorial disputes and Beijing’s cultivation of online nationalism through propaganda and disinformation, on Chinese internet there are also conspiracy theories specifically targeting Japanese schools in China, such as the one in Suzhou that the child victim went to.

Purveyors of these conspiracy theories suggest or outright claim that these schools train spies and are a conduit through which the Japanese government invades China culturally. In the comment sections of these online posts, many users call for the removal of these schools.

In a popular video posted last year on Chinese video app Bilibili, a narrator says that the Chinese people can never be too careful with what the Japanese are doing in their country because of Japan’s invasion of China during the second World War.

“Although the Anti-Japanese War ended decades ago, the wild ambitions of the Japanese are hardly a secret,” the narrator says. “So, nobody can be sure what exactly is going on in these exclusively Japanese schools.”

“虽然抗日战争已经结束几十年的时间，但是日本人的狼子野心早就昭然若揭。所以谁也不敢保证这些纯日本人学校到底在干些什么见不得人的勾当。”

The schools the narrator refers to are Japanese-only schools set up in China by Japanese institutions or companies for the children of Japanese professionals who work there. According to Chinese law, these schools cannot accept any Chinese nationals.

The schools are required to register the names of their faculties and students as well as teaching materials with the Chinese government annually. They also have to report changes of board members and principals to the Chinese authorities.

According to the website of the Japanese embassy in China, there are 11 full-day Japanese schools in mainland China and three in Hong Kong. There are also ten supplementary or weekend Japanese schools in the region.

But on Chinese social media, the number of Japanese schools in China, 21 if you include both full-day and weekend schools in mainland and Hong Kong, erupted to 35. Another number often regurgitated by many netizens was 137, which was likely made up to be connected to Unit 731, a Japanese army unit that conducted human experimentations and manufactured biological weapons in China during World War II.

The exclusion of Chinese students in Japanese schools, which is mandated by the Chinese government, became a sign that there are nefarious activities taking place inside these schools, according to those who spread the conspiracy theories.

“Due to so many unknown factors, our government has to inspect these 35 exclusively Japanese schools unannounced,” the narrator from the popular Bilibili video says. “If we don’t keep up our guard, there is no guarantee that they won’t engage in destructive activities on our territory.”

“正是因为太多未知因素，促使我国必须突击检查这35所纯日本学校。如果不加以防备，指不定哪天又在我国领土搞一些丧心病狂的事情。”

On Chinese social media, Japanese schools have become somewhat of a subject that attracts curiosity, suspicion and views. Vloggers would visit the perimeters of these schools and record and talk about what they see. The Japanese school in Suzhou, where one of the knife attack victims attended, was one of the schools often featured in these videos.

A lot of the rumors and unfounded accusations of Japanese schools in China have been fact-checked by self-media accounts as well as media outlets in China. But it did little to stop the continuous spreading of these conspiracy theories.

Last year, a Hong Kong actor’s social media post repeated the claim that Japanese schools in China refused to let in Chinese students. The post got over 248,000 likes and over 16,000 comments.

In May this year, a viral video claimed that a Japanese school in the southwestern city of Kunming was abducting Chinese children. The video was debunked by local authorities.  

In China, the government maintains strict control over what can and cannot be said on the internet. The widespread of xenophobia and nationalism on social media, fueled by disinformation, is considered by many outside observers as intentional.

Former Weibo censor Eric Liu posted on X after the recent knife attack that Beijing could have easily quelled the public’s hatred toward foreigners but chose not to.

“If China wants to ‘de-accelerate’ the extreme nationalistic xenophobia, technically it’s pretty easy. They only have to arrest a couple of those who claim that Japanese schools were spy bases, force them to confess in front of TV cameras and label them unemployed or attention seekers who did it for traffic and money, and the Chinese public would immediately shut up.”