The violence would have a familiar feeling to Americans and Europeans who collectively lived through the school shootings of the past several years, when each one triggered a wave of national mourning and introspection.

I suspect the questions being asked by parents across China are similar to those that got asked during the school shootings in the U.S. and Europe. How could this happen -- again? Is my child safe? How can we protect them at school?

The big difference in China is that there are few, if any, forums in which to ask those questions, to express communal shock and mourn as a nation. U.S. media, with all their flaws, still serve as a shared public experience when something horrible happens in America. It's one of the key roles that media in a free society play: Creating community, shared values and a common experience, while acting as a watchdog to drive change and reform.

During my days as a newspaper journalist there was a special energy that filled the newsroom when we were covering a major breaking news story, like a school shooting or stabbing would have been. We knew how to surround the story, explore its every angle, ask questions like "why did this happen" and "what can be done to prevent it from happening again."

Chinese media, given their lack of independence and their inexperience covering the big story, have simply been absent in filling that role in coverage of the school stabbings. The stories have not been ignored, for sure, but the coverage has been non-critical of the official explanation for these acts: the perpetrators are crazy. Full stop.

Undoubtedly that is true, but much too oversimplified to explain five such attacks in two months.

It's been interesting, though, to see what's happening in China's dynamic internet bulletin boards and blogs, where the knife attacks have received extensive discussion. I do the best I can to understand these conversations by using online translation tools, and the subject of many posts is sharply different from what's being said in traditional media.

Alongside the grief and the expressions of disbelief, there is also a group of commentators who blame the nature of Chinese society under one-party rule.

“In a society that has no release valve, killing the weakest members of society has become a release,” wrote Han Han, a prominent Chinese blogger.

The China Daily reported on this post in one of its online forums, and said that it was eventually deleted by government authorities. This is a strange example of how it is permissible journalism to report about what's being said by China's netizens, but not OK to actually raise similar questions in the original coverage or even to give the original stories the coverage they deserve.

I'm not sure how a nation works through the questions associated with tragedies like these school stabbings without a vibrant and aggressive media asking the right questions and providing the nation with a shared sense of mourning.

It seems to me that the emotions and issues generated by such national tragedies need a bottom-up outlet in which to be aired and examined. With China's traditional media unable to fill this role, the nation's social media have rushed in.