A 10-year-old student was fatally stabbed near a Japanese school in southern China on Wednesday, according to the Japanese and Chinese foreign ministries, in what appeared to be the latest in a spate of knife attacks on foreigners in the country.

       A 44-year-old man, surnamed Zhong, was in custody, according to a statement from the police in Shenzhen, the city where the attack occurred. The student was taken to a hospital, but died early Thursday of injuries sustained in the attack, the Japanese Embassy in China said.

       Neither the Chinese nor the Japanese authorities specified the nationality of the victim, whose surname is Shen, according to the Shenzhen police. (The Chinese character Shen can also be used for surnames in Japan.)

       But students at the Shenzhen Japanese School, near where the stabbing occurred, must be Japanese nationals, according to its website. And at a regularly scheduled news conference on Wednesday, Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said the government would continue to take “effective measures” to protect “the safety of all foreigners in China.”

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       A string of recent attacks has fueled fears that xenophobia and nationalism in China — which have been on the rise for years, often fanned by the government — are spilling over into violence. In June, four American teachers were stabbed in Jilin, a northern city; later that month, a Japanese woman and her child were attacked with a knife in Suzhou, a city in the east.

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       The Chinese government described each of those attacks as an isolated incident and said the assailants had not targeted citizens of any particular country. It insisted that the attacks could have happened anywhere in the world.

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