Kaiyuan stabbing attack

On 27 December 2020, a man carried out a mass stabbing in Kaiyuan, a city in Liaoning province, China, killing seven people and wounding others; reporting indicates fourteen people were attacked in total.

According to contemporaneous international coverage, including CNN and NBC News citing Chinese state media, the attack took place in the morning and was described by police as apparently random. Most of the victims were passers-by, reported to be mainly middle-aged or elderly women. The attack occurred near a school, but because the school was closed at the time, no students or staff were harmed; some accounts place it near a bathhouse.

The assailant wounded a police officer during the incident before being arrested at the scene. Authorities did not publicly establish a motive in the available reporting. Mass-casualty attacks in China are typically carried out with knives rather than firearms, which are tightly restricted.

Because reporting drew heavily on brief statements from Chinese state media, some details — including the identities of the victims and the full circumstances — were not comprehensively documented in available English-language sources.