China---wth??

News out this morning:

5 preschoolers hit with hammer in new China attack

BEIJING – A farmer attacked kindergarten students with a hammer, injuring five, before burning himself to death Friday in China's third such assault in as many days and prompting the government to demand stricter school security nationwide.


More:

The hammer attack follows a rampage Thursday by a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an eight-inch (20-centimeter) knife at a kindergarten. Some 29 students, aged 4 or 5 years old, were wounded, five of them seriously at the school in Taixing city in neighboring Jiangsu province.

And on Wednesday, a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the city of Leizhou in southern Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife. The attacker had been on sick leave from another school since 2006 for mental health problems.

Really. What the heck?

What would cause anyone, especially any adult, to attack children like this?

What is it about the Chinese culture, it would seem, that would cause grown adult men to attack virtually totally defenseless children with knives, as in the first two attacks, and now, here, with a hammer?

I would love to have some psychologist and/or sociologist who knows the Chinese either explain this or study it and get back to us as to why these people acted out like this.

There is this from the article:

Most of the recent school attacks have been blamed on people with personal grudges or mental illness — seen as a growing problem because of feelings of social injustice and alienation in the fast-changing country.

But children? Attacking children?

To save my life I can't figure it out. Mental illness would have to be the closest I could come to 'splainin' this one.

Link to original story here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100430/ap_on_re_as/as_china_students_attacked