A Chinese man who carried out a knife attack in eastern China last June that wounded a Japanese woman and her child and killed a bus attendant trying to protect them has been sentenced to death, according to a Japanese official. <\/p>\n
A court in the Chinese <\/strong>city of Suzhou ruled that the 52-year-old unemployed man, surnamed Zhou, stabbed the trio after he became indebted and lost interest in living, Japan\u2019s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Thursday. <\/p>\n Details of the ruling were not immediately available through Chinese official announcements or local news reports, but Hayashi said Japan\u2019s Consul General to Shanghai attended the sentencing. <\/p>\n \u201cThe (Japanese) government considers the killing and wounding of three people, including a completely innocent child, to be unforgivable, and we take the verdict with the utmost seriousness,\u201d Hayashi said. <\/p>\n Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stopped short of confirming the sentencing, saying only that \u201cChinese judicial authorities will handle (the case) in accordance with the law\u201d at a daily press conference on Thursday. <\/p>\n The stabbing attack was the first of two on Japanese nationals last year that raised concerns about anti-Japanese sentiment in China and prompted Tokyo to demand Beijing ensure its citizens\u2019 safety. <\/p>\n Knife attacks are not uncommon in China, where guns are tightly controlled. <\/p>\n The attacks relating to Japanese citizens have also occurred amid a surge of sudden episodes of violence targeting random members of the public in China, including at or near hospitals and schools. <\/p>\n The attack took place on June 24 when the Japanese mother was picking up her child at a bus stop near a Japanese school, Japanese officials previously said. <\/p>\n The mother and child suffered non-life-threatening injuries during the attack. But a Chinese bus attendant who tried to stop the attacker later died of her wounds. <\/p>\n On Thursday, Hayashi repeated calls for the Chinese government to protect Japanese nationals in China. The Suzhou court ruling stopped short of making any reference to Japan, he noted. <\/p>\n Nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment have been on the rise in the country, often fanned by state media and manifested in discussions on China\u2019s strictly censored social media platforms. <\/p>\n The sentiment is rooted in bitter memories of Japan\u2019s invasion and brutal occupation in the 1930s and 1940s and fueled by present-day territorial disputes. <\/p>\n In September last year, a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy was killed in a second knife attack near another Japanese school in the southern city of Shenzhen. The trial in that case was due to begin on Friday, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported. <\/p>\n The second attack took place on the anniversary of the \u201c918\u201d incident in 1931, when Japanese soldiers blew up a Japanese-owned railway in northeast China and blamed Chinese forces for the attack as a pretext to invade. <\/p>\n The two attacks raised alarm among Japanese living in China and prompted then Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida to demand \u201csuch an incident must never be repeated.\u201d <\/p>\n But China\u2019s foreign ministry described the attacks as \u201cisolated incidents,\u201d and said it had taken steps to ensure foreign nationals\u2019 safety in the country. <\/p>\n \u201cChina will continue to take measures to protect the safety of foreign citizens in China,\u201d Mao said on Thursday. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Chinese man who carried out a knife attack in eastern China last June that wounded a Japanese woman and her child and killed a bus attendant trying to protect them has been sentenced to death, according to a Japanese official. A court in the Chinese city of Suzhou ruled that the 52-year-old unemployed man, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12358,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}