China has executed two men who killed dozens of people in attacks seen as revenge for issues in their personal lives.
Fan Weiqu, 62, who rammed his car into a crowd outside a sports stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai in November, killling 35, was executed on Monday. The attack was the deadliest in more than 10 years.
Police said Fan was driven by "dissatisfaction" over how his property had been divided following his divorce.
He was detained at the scene and found with self-inflicted wounds, police said.
Also in November, 21-year-old Xu Jiajin killed eight people and injured 17 others in a stabbing attack at his vocational school in the eastern city of Wuxi.
Police said Wu had failed his examinations and could not graduate, and was dissatisfied about his pay at an internship. He was also executed on Monday, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
Both attacks have raised concerns about a surge in so-called revenge on society crimes. The number of such attacks across China reached 19 in 2024.
Within days of the Zhuhai and Wuxi attacks, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30.
The man, Huang Wen, was said to have wanted to vent his anger after dealing with investment losses and family conflict.
The killings spurred Chinese president Xi Jinping to urge local governments to take measures to prevent such attacks.
Analysts told the BBC that the string of killings also raised questions about how people in China were dealing with various sources of stress, including the country's sluggish economy and cost of living.
"The tensions do seem to be building, and it doesn't look like there is any way it is going to ease up in the near future," George Magnus, an economist at Oxford University's China Centre, told the BBC.
The two men’s death sentences were issued by the intermediate people’s courts in the cities of Zhuhai and Wuxi, respectively, in December and approved by the Supreme People’s Court, according to state media.
China is believed to execute more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined, though the precise total is classified a state secret.
Executions are traditionally carried out by gunshot, though lethal injections have also been introduced in recent years.
