Murder of Tan and Fei (2018 Shanghai stabbings)

On 28 June 2018, shortly before 11:30 a.m., four people were stabbed with a kitchen knife near the West Campus gate of the Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School in the Xuhui District of Shanghai, China. Two male students, identified by their surnames Tan and Fei, were killed; a third schoolboy, Jin, and a female parent, Zhang, sustained minor head injuries. The attack took place approximately 130 meters from the school gate, on the sidewalk of Guilin West Street on Pubei Road. Bystanders, including school security guards, city management staff, and a passing air conditioner repairman, restrained the attacker and rendered first aid to the injured before police arrived. The assailant, 29-year-old Huang Yichuan, offered no resistance when police took him into custody.

Tan died of injury to the central nervous system and hemorrhagic shock. Fei died of a brain injury and hemorrhagic shock resulting from stab wounds to his head, face, and left palm.

According to an examination by the First Branch of the Shanghai People's Procuratorate, Huang Yichuan was unemployed at the time of the attack and had traveled to Shanghai in early June 2018 after failing to find work elsewhere, having conceived a plan to take revenge on society through murder. He had studied architecture at Hunan University of Science and Technology, repeatedly failed postgraduate admission exams, and changed jobs more than ten times in the years following graduation. A journalistic investigation by Caixin Online found that his parents had divorced when he was a child and that his grandmother had schizophrenia for decades; relatives suspected he may have inherited the condition. In the year before the killings, he visited kindergartens and primary schools in several cities while planning the attack, ultimately targeting the Shanghai school after hearing on the radio that it planned to hold a graduation ceremony.

Huang was arrested on 29 June 2018, and prosecutors initiated a public prosecution for intentional murder on 14 August 2018. At trial, prosecutors noted Huang had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had limited criminal responsibility, but the court found his motive particularly sinister, the crime long-planned, and the method particularly brutal. On 23 May 2019, the First Intermediate People's Court of Shanghai sentenced Huang Yichuan to death for intentional homicide and deprived him of political rights for life, ruling that his mental illness did not affect his ability to control his behavior. He appealed, and on 30 December 2019 the Shanghai Senior People's Court rejected the appeal and upheld the original judgment. Huang Yichuan was executed on 3 December 2020.