A casual browse through Chinese news turns up chaos and tragedy on every side — an atmosphere of a dying age, and it is the ordinary people who suffer for it. This article offers a few examples, with brief commentary. First: Revenge-on-society attacks are becoming frequent — attacks on primary school children, on foreigners, and now indiscriminate attacks on anyone at all Haidian police in Beijing reported that at around 3:20 p.m. on October 28, a knife attack occurred near the intersection of Wanquanzhuang Road and Wanliu Middle Road in Haidian District, injuring five passersby, including three minors. The police notice deliberately played down the details. In fact, the attack took place at Zhongguancun No. 3 Primary School, injuring three children, two of them seriously — one child, in trying to shield his head with his hands, had his fingers severed. Vicious incidents of this kind are now everywhere in China. For example: on the night of October 23, in Qingdao, Shandong, a concrete mixer truck rammed into multiple vehicles; on October 8, in Guangzhou's Tianhe District, a man in his sixties stabbed people outside a primary school gate, injuring three, two of them schoolchildren; at 9 p.m. on September 30, at a Walmart in the Ledu International Shopping Plaza in Shanghai's Songjiang District, a 37-year-old man carried out an indiscriminate knife attack on shoppers, killing three and injuring fifteen (police said the man had long sought unpaid wages without success, fell into desperate circumstances, and ultimately conceived the idea of taking revenge on society)... The attacks are not limited to Chinese victims — foreigners have been targeted too. On September 19, for instance, a ten-year-old boy at the Shenzhen Japanese School died after being attacked by an assailant roughly 200 meters from the school gate. On June 24, in Suzhou, a man rushed at a school bus full of Japanese elementary school children with a knife and stabbed three of them; had a Chinese woman on the bus not fought desperately to stop the attacker — she later died of her injuries — many more children would have been hurt. On June 10, four American teachers were stabbed at Beishan Park in Jilin City, Jilin Province, and left lying in blood on the ground... There have also been incidents abroad. On August 27, for example, a 33-year-old Chinese exchange student in Australia threw hot coffee on a nine-month-old baby boy... Why has China seen such a surge of vicious revenge-on-society incidents? Across the board, people see the root cause as the CCP's evil rule. On one hand, the CCP believes in violence — cases of urban management officers (chengguan) and police beating people to death are common, and the regime as a whole functions like a giant mafia. On the other hand, the CCP strips people of freedom of belief, suppresses authentic faith, and destroys traditional culture and morality, leaving people with no faith and no fear of retribution, causing them to lose any moral bottom line — and this allows resentment to accumulate in society over the long term. Once triggered, many people transform from victims of government abuse into avengers against society. Second: Infighting at the top, mafia-ization at the grassroots, and corruption beyond saving According to anti-corruption data from the CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission: from January to September this year, 642,000 cases were filed nationwide, including 58 provincial- and ministerial-level officials, 3,263 bureau- and department-level officials, 26,000 county- and division-level officials, and 89,000 township- and section-level officials. Also filed were cases against 77,000 current or former village Party branch secretaries and village committee directors. This shows that corruption has penetrated to the very marrow of the system and exists everywhere. The filing of 58 provincial- and ministerial-level officials in the first nine months alone means the number of centrally-managed officials investigated this year has already exceeded last year's full-year total, a historic high. As is well known, at the top of the CCP's pyramid are the so-called "centrally-managed cadres" — officials managed directly by the central Party leadership, mainly at the full-ministerial and vice-ministerial ranks, along with some centrally-managed bureau chiefs — numbering roughly 3,000 nationwide (in active posts) in total. Since Xi Jinping came to power at the end of 2012, the anti-corruption campaign has been unprecedented in intensity: among centrally-managed cadres, 31 fell in 2013, 38 in 2014, 37 in 2015, 22 in 2016, 18 in 2017, 23 in 2018, 20 in 2019, 18 in 2020, 25 in 2021, 32 in 2022, and at least 45 in 2023. The sharp jump in the 2024 figures shows that internal Party infighting has become fiercer than ever. The filing of 77,000 current or former village Party branch secretaries and village committee directors in the first nine months alone already exceeds last year's full-year total for the same category of cases (61,000). This shows that mafia-ization has become widespread in China's rural villages. According to National Bureau of Statistics figures, there are more than 600,000 village (and residents') committees nationwide. In recent years, as the CCP has swung further left, the practice of open elections ("hai xuan") for village chief has given way to a system in which the posts of village committee director and Party branch secretary are held by the same person — meaning the number of village Party secretaries and village committee directors nationwide totals around 700,000. The filing of 77,000 cases in nine months amounts to a rate of over 10%. This also shows that the three-year "Special Campaign to Combat Organized Crime and Root Out Evil Forces" launched by the authorities in 2018 — whose official documents called for combining the crackdown on organized crime with grassroots anti-corruption efforts, dismantling the "protective umbrellas" shielding criminal gangs, and eliminating the soil in which organized crime breeds — has failed completely. The corrupting power available even to a mere village chief exceeds what an ordinary person might imagine. For example, mainland media reported that on October 27, a Party branch secretary in Heilongjiang, while visiting impoverished households, was seen wearing a Hermes belt and driving what was believed to be a Toyota Land Cruiser worth over a million yuan — sparking heated discussion online.