guardian.co.uk,
Lijia Zhang, Saturday 22 October 2011
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| Yueyue’s mother after she was called to where her daughter was found. Photograph: China Foto Press / Barcroft Medi |
Shame on us
Chinese! Last Thursday a two-year-old girl was run over twice, about 100 metres
from her home in a hardware market district of Foshan, a prosperous city in
southern China. As she lay on the ground, writhing in pain, before being hit by
the second vehicle, 18 people, on their bicycles, in cars or on foot, passed by
but chose to ignore her. Among them a young woman with her own child.
Finally, a
58-year-old female rubbish collector came to the girl's rescue, but it was too
late. By the time she was brought to the hospital, the girl Yueyue, (whose name
translates as Little Joy), was brain dead. She was declared dead early on
Friday morning. She was a good girl, full of life, her mother said a few days
ago in an interview. She said she had just brought Yueyue back from her
kindergarten. She popped out to collect the dry clothes and returned to find
Yueyue gone – probably trying to look for her elder brother.
It might
have been a different story if one of the 18 people had lent Yueyue a hand.
None even bothered to call for emergency services. Later, when interviewed by a
journalist, one of the passersby, a middle-aged man riding a scooter, said with
an uncomfortable smile on his face: "That wasn't my child. Why should I
bother?"
Before
giving himself up to the police, the driver of the second vehicle, a van, told
the media why he had run away. "If she is dead, I may pay only about
20,000 yuan (£2,000). But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of
thousands of yuan." What's wrong with these people? How could they be so
cold-hearted? The horrific scene was caught by a surveillance camera and has
been watched by millions of viewers since it was posted on Youku, China's
equivalent of YouTube.
This is
only the latest incident where tragedy has struck as a result of the callous
inactivity of onlookers. Last month an 88-year-old man fell over face down at
the entrance of a vegetable market near his home. For almost 90 minutes, he was
ignored by people in the busy market. After his daughter found him and called
an ambulance, the old man died "because of a respiratory tract clogged by
a nosebleed". If anyone had turned him over, he might have survived.
Both cases,
the death of Yueyue in particular, have provoked much public outrage and a
nationwide discussion about morality in today's China. From Shanghai, someone
with the cybername 60sunsetred wrote: "The Chinese people have arrived at
their most morality-free moment!" There was plenty of condemnation of the
cold-heartedness of the passersby. But, astonishingly, a large percentage of posters
said they understood why the onlookers did not lend a helping hand. Some
admitted they would do the same – for fear of getting into trouble and fear of
facing another "Nanjing judge".
Let me
explain the story of the muddle-headed Nanjing judge. In 2006, in the capital
of Jiangsu province, a young man named Peng Yu helped an old woman who had
fallen on the street and took her to a hospital and waited to see if the old
woman was all right. Later, however, the woman and her family accused Peng of
causing her fall. A judge decided in favour of the woman, based on the
assumption that "Peng must be at fault. Otherwise why would he want to
help?", saying that Peng acted against "common sense". The
outcry from the public in support of Peng forced the court to adjust its verdict
and resulted in Peng paying 10% of the costs instead of the total. Since that
incident Peng has become a national cautionary tale: the Good Samaritan being
framed by the beneficiary of their compassion.
It's true
that in China you can get into trouble when you try to help. Weeks ago I
spotted an accident on the fourth ring road in Beijing as I returned home one
night. A man was hit by a "black car", an "illegal taxi",
and his face was all bloody. Watched over by a crowd, the injured man behaved
aggressively towards the driver. I got off my scooter. As I tried to pull the
two men apart, I was struck myself. When I asked if anyone had reported this to
the police, the driver said no. I couldn't believe that people just stared as
if enjoying a free show, without doing anything. I called the helpline and the
policemen turned up soon after.
The
fundamental problem, in my view, lies in one word that describes a state of
mind: shaoguanxianshi, meaning don't get involved if it's not your business. In
our culture, there's a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We
are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi, family and
friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially
if such kindness may potentially damage your interest.
Fei
Xiaotong, China's first sociologist, described Chinese people's moral and
ethical characteristics in his book, From the Soil, in the middle of the last
century. He pointed out that selfishness is the most serious shortcoming of the
Chinese. "When we think of selfishness, we think of the proverb 'Each
person should sweep the snow from his own doorsteps and should not fret about
the frost on his neighbour's roof,'" wrote Fei. He offered the example of
how the Chinese of that period threw rubbish out of their windows without the
slightest public concern. Things are much the same today.
Under Mao,
citizens were forced to behave themselves in both public and private spheres.
Every March, people were obliged to go into the street to do good deeds:
cleaning buses, fixing bicycles and offering haircuts. Now relaxed social
control and commercialisation over the past three decades have led people to
behave more selfishly again.
People are
enjoying, and sometimes abusing, the vast personal freedoms that didn't exist
before. To start with, it is now safe to be "naughty". Back in the
early 1980s, when I worked at a rocket factory in Nanjing, one of my
colleagues, a married man, was caught having an affair with an unmarried woman.
He was given a three-year sentence in a labour camp and the girl was disgraced.
In today's society, having extramarital affairs or keeping an ernai – second
wife or concubine – is as common as "cow hair", as the Chinese would
say. For a novel I am writing on prostitution, I have interviewed many
prostitutes and ernai. Many see their profession as a way to gather wealth quickly,
feeling few moral qualms.
China's
moral crisis doesn't just manifest itself in personal life but also in business
practice and many other areas. The high-profile "poisoned milk
powder" case and the scandal of using "gutter oil" as cooking
oil have shocked and disgusted people around the world. Last year an article,
"Why have Chinese lost their sense of morality?", in which the author
tried to find an explanation, was widely read. He reasoned that China has
introduced the concept of a market economy from the west but failed to import
the corresponding ethics, while the traditional moral principles of China no
longer fit the market economy model.
There's a
lot of sense in that. I believe that the lack of a value system is also
deepening the moral crisis. Before Mao, the indifference towards others once so
accurately described by Fei existed but was mitigated by a traditional moral
and religious system. That system was then almost destroyed by the communists,
especially during the 10 mad years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to
1976. Nowadays communism, the ideology that dominated Chinese people's lives
like a religion, has also more or less collapsed. As a result, there's a
spiritual vacuum that cannot be filled by the mere opportunity of money-making.
To drag
China out of its moral crisis will be a long battle. The pressing question is
how to make people act in cases of emergency and the solution is law. After the
"Nanjing case", there have been discussions about introducing a law
that imposes a "duty of rescue" as exists in many European countries.
I am all for it, because that's probably the only way to propel action for a
people who do not see a moral obligation in rescuing others.
The Yueyue
incident revealed an ugly side of China. I hope the entire nation will take the
opportunity to take a hard look at ourselves and ask ourselves what's wrong
with society. There's at least hope in the action of the rubbish collector who
rushed to Yueyue's side without hesitation.
China's
economy is galloping like a horse without a rein and its position in the world
is rising. We Chinese have every reason to feel proud about what we've
achieved. Now we demand respect. But how can we possibly win respect and play
the role of a world leader if this is a nation with 1.4 billion cold hearts?
Related Article:
The incident was captured on surveillance cameras
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