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On Aug. 9, a suicide bomber killed two people and critically injured 30 in a gruesome bus explosion in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province in southern China. According to the police, the suicide bomber, who died on the scene, was a 42-year-old peasant with end-stage lung cancer. In a society that emphasizes stability and harmony, the suicide bombing has shocked many and moved China’s health care—or lack thereof—to the center of public debate.  

Details of the bombing remain unknown. The Xinhua News Agency, China’s state-run news agency, reported that two people died, but local sources said at least nine people were killed in the blast. The Chinese police found a letter left by the suicide bomber but have refused to make it public.  

“Huang’s posthumous writing should be published, which will help the police investigation as well as discover the truth about why he committed the suicide bombing,” the South Metropolitan Daily in China said in an editorial.  

While most of the Chinese media speculated that the peasant committed the suicide bombing in despair over his lung cancer, other speculations abound, especially in the United States-based Chinese language media. Qingchuan Ji, from the America Fujian Assembly in San Francisco, suspects there are other reasons for the suicide bombing in his hometown.  

Ji told the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper with six operations in North America, that it “defies common sense” to assume the cancer was the catalyst. People with incurable diseases may commit suicide, he said. They “might kill themselves at home,” said Ji, “but they don’t kill or hurt people in public.”  

Other commentators point to the negative impact of world news on Chinese society. Che Hon Wu, the director of the American Chinese Business Association, told the World Journal that Chinese people have been increasingly exposed to news from the outside world and are changing the way they respond to society. “People have more freedom,” Che said. “They can do anything they want, and they can dare to do anything they want.”  

But inside China, the culprit is widely perceived as the inept health care system. China Youth Newspaper, a Beijing-based government news agency targeting the young generation, asked in an editorial, “Had he been kicked out of the hospital because he could not afford his medical bills? Was his lung cancer an occupational disease (as many peasants left their homes to work in the cities)? Could his children afford to go to school after he fell ill?”  

The suicide bombing happened just days after the Chinese government acknowledged that health care reform efforts were “unsuccessful.”  

Before 1985, the Chinese government financially supported its hospitals, so people only paid a small fee to visit doctors under the government-controlled economic system. In 1985, the Chinese government introduced market-driven reforms, requiring patients to pay in full for hospital visits, even in emergencies. Patients are often turned away from emergency rooms because they can not pay a deposit first.  

Commenting on the failure of the reform, Ge Yanfeng, deputy chief of the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC), a policy research and consulting institution directly under the Chinese State Council, told the China Youth Newspaper that the Chinese health care system has been infected by the “American Disease,” whose symptoms are inefficiency and inequity.  

Such criticism further fueled public speculation that the suicide bombing was done as a protest against China’s health care system. Two days after the suicide bombing, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao vowed in a State Department meeting to speed up the building of a new medical system in rural China. Wen pledged to cover 40 percent of the peasants in his new medical system by 2006, up from 21 percent now. Peasants make up of 80 percent of China’s more than 1.3 billion people.  

Statistics from Chinese Health Department show that though hospital visits did not increase much from 2000 to 2003, the profits made by hospitals increased by 70 percent during that period. It enormously overran the income raise in China. The Chinese Health Department reports that 48.9 percent of people who need hospital care never go to the hospital, and 29.6 percent of those who need hospital stays choose to go home instead. Peasants now have a saying, “An ambulance costs a pig; a day in the hospital costs a whole year’s work.”  

The true motives of the suicide bombing, a rare form of violence in China, lingers in mystery. In an editorial titled “We Are on the Same Bus,” the China Youth Newspaper said, “the exploded bus is just like our society—while endangered by despairing ones, it’s no longer a safe place for all of us.”  

Gabrielle Orleans has worked as a correspondent in China, Egypt and the United States, where she is currently a graduate student in journalism. ?