The first half of 2004 has seen a number of serious homicide cases in China. First there was Ma Jiajue, a Yunnan University student who had carefully plotted a murderous scheme to brutally hammer four of his classmates to death. Ma Jiajue was finally captured in Sanya in South China's Hainan Province.

Just before the Ma Jiajue case and its attendant commotion had faded, another ghastly murder case occurred in downtown Nanchang in East China's Jiangxi Province on May 16. A medical student named Xue Ronghua stabbed two people to death and wounded five others.

Six of the seven victims were undergraduate and graduate students, the other was a passer-by and a stranger to Xue Ronghua. Of the victims, five were women. Xue phoned the police four hours after the murders and he was arrested.

The next big murder case was in Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province. Zhou Yinan, a former vice-president of Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, was found murdered in his apartment along with his wife, his four-year-old daughter and two others.

Why such gruesome murders are happening again and again is really a thought-provoking question. Some might again play the old tune of the "huge chasm between the haves and have-nots" and this theory sounds convincing at first. Ma Jiajue and Xue Ronghua both came from financially-strapped families and Zhou Yinan and his family were murdered because Zhou's wife inadvertently revealed their wealth to evil persons.

However, one may then ask: "Why were there no similar cases of murder in China in the 1920s and 1930s when the polarization of wealth and poverty was as bad or even worse than it is today and there were also college students from poverty-stricken families?"

Amid the clamour over South Korea's application to have its Dragon Boat Festival proclaimed as the country's own Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, I said to a friend that it would be a staggering embarrassment to all Chinese if South Korea had also submitted an application to the UN to have Confucianist culture proclaimed as its own "World Cultural Heritage".

It is a well-known fact that Confucianism is still highly respected in South Korea, Confucianist values still play a large role in the daily life of South Koreans. While in China, Confucius and Confucianism were utterly discredited in the movement to "eradicate the four olds" and during the cultural revolution. Since then, Confucianism has largely faded from the minds of the public despite the fact that Confucius' reputation has been rehabilitated.

Chinese society is in a transitional period, and social disorder and violent crime are inevitable. But things are somewhat worse in China because many Chinese have found themselves in a spiritual vacuum: they have no faith in traditional moral values and a new set of ethics and values has yet to be put in place.

The older generation might still have the remnants of traditional morality in their consciousness and they more or less conduct themselves with moral integrity. The younger generation, however, lives more and more outside the grip of fear and belief and some are eager for quick and easy profits and have little regard to morality in the way they conduct themselves.

Therefore, the central authorities have emphasized the need for moral education among the young with the aim of rebuilding the values and ethical code of a collective society.This is a great task requiring the concerted effort of the whole society.

starcomment@yahoo.com