When eight assailants armed with foot-long sabers set upon men and women in the southwestern city of Kunming, killing at least twenty-nine people and injuring a hundred and forty-three, they struck in a place and a manner that nobody in China had anticipated. For all its epic history of bloodshed, the People’s Republic is unaccustomed to this kind of threat against citizens going about their daily lives, and, by day’s end, the attack was seared into public consciousness in a way that, since 9/11, has become customary for these moments around the world: it is the 3/1 incident. A message in wide circulation declared, “We are all Kunmingers.”
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