Julien Sorel in China

A young undergraduate stabbed his classmates to death in China, after a couple of them teased him about his being too poor to afford to go home during the spring break. Another one, Xue Ronghua, went on a killing rampage, mortally knifing two students inside an internet cafe, after the school forced him to leave in a campus dorm.

Xue apparently was teased by his classmates for being an unsophisticated provincial person. It didn't help that Xue was sensitive, "like a woman," it was said. Xue didn't confide to his parents, but he did cryptically write them in March: "Being poor is not something that one should be afraid of," Xue wrote, "but if one loses their will, then that should be something to fear."

Xue was probably scared that he was losing control of his will. It must have been disturbing, nay devastating, for a young man with hopes of social mobility, to watch his only possession trampled by kids who would never know, in their insular charmed lives courtesy of Deng Xiaoping , the feeling of having to sleep on an empty stomach. And so before his will deserts him, he decides to use it in one last display of self-assertion and individuality, by murdering those who caused his distress, much like what Julien Sorel did in Stendhal's The Red and the Black when he resolved to kill Mme de Renal while hearing mass.

We will never know for sure the reasons behind the crimes (The Beijing Review attempts a psychological profiling of the students ), but the recent incidents in the campuses have thrust to the fore the massive economic inequality in China ( gini-index score was 46 last year ) , Newsweek reports. There is a nagging suspicion among the Chinese public that the socioeconomic background of those students, their having come from poor families in China's countryside, had something major to do with their adjustment problems in the city's campuses. What makes the story of these students doubly sad is the fact that China is supposedly a socialist haven, a redoubt for the downtrodden and the oppressed. How could some of its students be tortured by their lowly social class?