US college lecturer reports knife attack in China

HONG KONG — An American college professor has given the first personal account of a knife attack in China that left him and several others injured.

David Zabner said he and three colleagues from Cornell College, a private liberal arts college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, were leaving a public park in the northeastern Chinese city of Jilin on Monday when he heard a scream.

“I turned around and saw a man threatening me with a knife. I didn’t immediately realize what was happening, I thought my colleagues had been pushed,” Zabner told Iowa Public Radio from a hospital in Jilin.

“Then I looked at my shoulder and realized: ‘I’m bleeding, I’ve been stabbed.'”

Police in Jilin said on Tuesday that a 55-year-old man surnamed Cui was arrested on Monday in connection with the attack. They said he “collided with a foreigner” while walking in Beishan Park and stabbed a total of four foreigners as well as a Chinese national who tried to stop him.

“The police told us he was unemployed and down on his luck and that someone in our group bumped into the man,” Zabner said. “And he chose to react the way he did.”

None of the victims suffered life-threatening injuries, police said. Zabner said he was stabbed in the arm six inches below his shoulder and paramedics arrived after about 20 minutes.

U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said Tuesday that three U.S. citizens and a foreign national living in Iowa had been stabbed and that a U.S. consular official had visited all four in hospital in Jilin.

Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa said she had spoken to Zabner’s family in Iowa City, which is in her district. She said Zabner was “fine, he can probably travel and return to the United States,” while the other two Americans were in more critical condition after surgeries.

“They are in intensive care but are stable and talking to their families,” she told NBC News.

The lecturers were in China as part of a joint program with Beihua University launched in 2018. Zabner, a doctoral student at Tufts University and a graduate of Cornell College, had already participated in the program in November 2019 when he taught computer science courses.

“I was really excited to see it in the summer,” he said of Jilin, where winters are bitterly cold.

On Monday, a holiday in China, Zabner and his colleagues decided to visit Beishan Park, a hilly green area in central Jilin that is home to several ancient temples.

“You have a great view of the city from above,” he said.

Violent crimes against foreigners are rare in China, where gun laws are among the strictest in the world. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the attack appeared to be an isolated incident and was still being investigated.

Chinese state media had not initially commented on the attack, and discussion of it also appeared to be tightly controlled on China’s heavily censored social media. The attack came at a time when the US and China are trying to improve their relations, including people-to-people contacts.

Some online commentators expressed concern about the potential impact on China’s reputation.

“There are many videos on the Internet about how ‘China is safe’, and now this beautiful image of China has been destroyed by this attacker,” said one user on the social media platform Weibo.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said on Tuesday that the knife attack would not affect the normal course of cultural exchanges between the United States and China.

“China is considered one of the safest countries in the world,” he said. “China has always taken and will continue to take effective measures to ensure the safety of all foreigners in the country.”