From Revenge to Grievance: Motivations, Weapon Choice, and Lethality in Chinese Mass Killings

China’s rapid urbanization has attenuated traditional social bonds, yet whether mass killing patterns have evolved accordingly remains empirically unexamined. Analyzing 256 non-political mass killing incidents in mainland China from 2004 to 2024, I examine patterns of mass killing incidents based on geography, motivations, weapon choice, and lethality. Despite rural dominance in overall mass killing frequency, I found that high-casualty events emerged to concentrate in urban or semi-urban centers and transportation settings. Negative binomial regression reveals that generalized grievance-motivated perpetrators predict 32% more fatalities than revenge-driven offenders, while ranged, arson, and explosive methods yield 51% higher fatality counts. Temporal analysis found significant clustering in rural areas but uniform distribution in large-sized cities, with no interarrival effects detected. Multinomial logistic regression further demonstrates that generalized grievance-motivated perpetrators exhibit significantly higher odds of selecting vehicles over edged weapons, with location in large-sized cities independently associated with higher odds of vehicle use. A rural-urban differentiation of mass killing patterns in China was revealed: rural violence remains embedded in collective, revenge-oriented patterns, while urban settings exhibit atomized, grievance-driven attacks against anonymous publics. China may thus present a case of partial and uneven mass society formation, where socioeconomic atomization and state censorship jointly produce a structurally constrained variant of mass violence. Limitations and policy implications are discussed.