Humanity with Han Characteristics: Coldblooded Morality in Communist China

By Gerry Shih | AP

In this Saturday, June 10, 2017 photo, a website shows a frame from a video of a woman as she is run over by a car at a traffic junction displayed on a computer in Beijing, China. The grainy video of a traffic accident in the city of Zhumadian surfaced on Chinese social media this week, the initial reaction was one of outrage directed at the more than 40 pedestrians and drivers who passed within meters of the woman, all failing to offer help. Chinese character at bottom reads “Tragedy” Women hit and unassisted gets run over, what kind of accident is this?”

BEIJING — A speeding taxi knocks the pedestrian off her feet, sending her hurtling through the air. Dozens of people stand gawking or walk past, as if the young woman sprawled in the busy intersection simply doesn’t exist. 

A full minute passes, and another speeding vehicle, this time an SUV, tramples the prone woman. 

Her unconscious body churns under its large wheels like a lumpen sack.
After a grainy video of a traffic accident in the city of Zhumadian surfaced on Chinese social media this past week, the initial reaction was one of outrage directed at the more than 40 pedestrians and drivers who passed within meters of the woman, all failing to offer help.
But for many Chinese, the video was something more: a 94-second reminder of their society’s deep rot.
Even as China presents itself outwardly as a prosperous rising power, around kitchen tables and in private WeChat groups, Chinese citizens routinely grumble about a nation that’s gone bankrupt when it comes to two qualities: “suzhi,” or “personal character,” and “dixian,” literally “bottom line” — or a basic, inviolable sense of right and wrong.
Here is an unmoored country where manufacturers knowingly sell toxic baby formula and fraudulent children’s vaccines. 

Restaurants cook with recycled “gutter oil” and grocery stores peddle fake eggs, fake fruit, even fake rice. 

Chinese avoid helping people on the street because of widespread stories about extortionists who seek help from passers-by and then feign injuries and demand compensation — perhaps explaining the Zhumadian incident.
“It’s a problem with the entire country: our moral bottom line has fallen so low,” Tian You, a novelist based in the southeastern city of Shenzhen, said by phone. 

“If I’m truly honest, I wonder, would I myself have dared to help the woman?”
After the Zhumadian video surfaced this week, garnering more than 5 million views in its first 24 hours before being censored, local police were forced to disclose that the accident took place weeks earlier, on April 21. 

The woman, surnamed Ma, died, while the two drivers who hit her were held under investigation, police said, without giving further details.
The news swept through social media and even state media outlets. 

The Communist Youth League, an influential party organization, circulated the video on its Weibo account, urging its 5 million followers to “reject indifference.” 

An opinion column on china.com, a state media organ, asked citizens to “reflect” on the tragedy. Others used the episode as a starting point to vent about social ills.
“Like the polluted haze facing our country, we see boundless corruption, left-behind children, medical disputes and so forth,” a columnist in the Chengdu Economic Daily wrote. 

“Have our society’s morals gotten better or worse in the last 10 years? What about our future, are you confident about that? Don’t ask me, because I’m not.”
Public concern about China’s morals has reached back decades and across age groups. 

Ever since China began its free market reforms in the 1980s, older citizens have frequently griped about its moral decay and profess nostalgia about a more innocent socialist era, while younger, worldly Chinese wonder why fraud and fake products aren’t as rampant in other countries.
Chinese scholars say that many issues that leave the middle class disillusioned are a result of lagging government regulation and the dislocating forces of swift development.
“In the West, law, faith and morality are a three-legged stool,” said Ma Ai, a sociologist at the China University of Political Science and Law. 

“We don’t have religion and a new moral system has not established after China transformed away from a traditional, collectivist society.”
A national debate flared up following a similar case in 2011, when an unattended 2-year old was hit by a truck on a busy street in Guangdong province and laid in a pool of blood without any help from bystanders for seven minutes. 

She died later. 

In 2009, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, ran a provocative story with a picture of a dog standing by another injured dog in a busy street and pondered whether Chinese would do the same. 

The report was headlined, “Do Chinese people lack compassion?”

A 2014 state media poll found that Chinese thought “lacking faith and ethics” was the No. 1 social problem, followed by “being a bystander or being selfish.”
Many in China’s intelligentsia reject the idea that an ancient strain of Chinese culture that focuses on the immediate family explains modern tragedies like Zhumadian. 

More frequently heard are indictments of the Communist regime that has suppressed religion and traditional values and emphasized stability over justice.
Tian, the Shenzhen writer, cited the Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao Zedong in the 1960s, which turned families and neighbors against each other in a battle for survival. 

Hyper-capitalistic, no-holds-barred competition consumed the reform era that followed Mao’s death.
“Our political system doesn’t regulate the things it should and it manages things it shouldn’t,” said Zhang Wen, a well-known Beijing commentator who pointed out that many charitable organizations have disbanded due to government pressure, resulting in a decline of “charity spirit.”
In his own middle-class circle, Zhang said, many friends speak about feeling “emotionally withdrawn” in the pressure-cooker economy.
“We’ve become individuals, alienated and doing whatever we can to get ahead,” he said. 

“There is no space left to care for others.”

Sina Delenda Est: Coldblooded Nation

Heartless crowds do NOTHING to help woman knocked down by hit and run taxi in China… leaving her to be killed by a second car
By IAN JOHNSON

SHOCKING footage shows a woman being killed when she’s hit by a car and left lying in the street – then run over a second time after bystanders failed to stop and help.
Video of the double hit-and-run was released recently by authorities in the city of Zhumadian, China, and has caused outrage among viewers.

Police say the woman (pictured trying to cross the road before she was struck) died from the two accidents

The pedestrian was first hit by a taxi (top right) while trying to cross the road

CCTV captured her lying motionless on the road following the hit and run

She was then run over a second time after bystanders failed to come to her aid

BEIJING — An agonizing traffic accident caught on surveillance cameras has reignited a debate in China about a lack of values in society.
The episode took place on April 21 in Zhumadian, a city in the central province of Henan. 

The graphic video, which was posted online Wednesday, shows a woman trying to cross a street on a crosswalk during what appears to be a red light for pedestrians.
After crossing two lanes, she is struck by a taxi and tossed in the air before landing on the ground. Then the light turns green for pedestrians. 

People walk by but do not help, nor do the drivers who were stopped at the light. 

The woman lifts her head, but the traffic resumes and she is soon run over by an S.U.V. 

She later died from her injuries.

“If this case was only about the first driver running away after hitting the victim, it would just be a normal traffic accident,” said Zhang Xuebing, a lawyer and a former law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai. 

“But the reason it’s stirred up a heated discussion is because onlookers on site didn’t help the victim.”

The original video has been viewed 30 million times. 

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media site, the original post has been shared 70,000 times and attracted 80,000 comments. 

On a report on the video by China News, a user called Zhuwu left this comment:
“It is not the onlookers but society that is coldblooded.”
Some say the problem is a legal one. 

In 2006, a man in Nanjing who helped an injured woman get to a hospital was held financially responsible for her treatment on the grounds that he would only have helped if he were responsible. In addition, many Chinese are wary of helping because of numerous scams where people purport to be victims of an injury in order to extract compensation.
“In the aftermath of the Nanjing case, many Chinese worry about the victims turning around to blame the helpers, and thus feel unable to offer direct help,” Dali L. Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the lack of humanity in China, said in an interview.
That was the view of one poster named Ranmo: “If I helped her to get up and sent her to the hospital, doctors would ask you to pay the medical bill. Her relatives would come and beat you up indiscriminately. Traffic police would then ask you to submit the data in your automobile data recorder and write up your witness account. It would go on till the next morning. Then the relatives would casually say ‘Sorry and thank you’ and then you could finally go home, exhausted, and deal with the blood on the back seat of your car. Am I stupid?”

The police announced this week after the public outcry that the two drivers of the vehicles that hit the woman had been found. 

The police added that compensation had been paid to the victim’s family, but it was unclear who paid it.
A common concern is that society lacks a moral compass. 

Some commenters on Weibo noted that onlookers could have saved the woman simply by stopping the traffic. 

The Weibo user Jillna Chen wrote: “If someone went to halt the traffic and called the police — didn’t even have to help her get up — she wouldn’t have died. If one can leave a society that is this coldhearted, that may not be a bad thing.”
Concern about the state of morality is reinforced by the frequency of these reports. 

Last year, a woman was stuffed into the trunk of a car and apparently kidnapped while bystanders did nothing. 

Also last year, a woman was slashed in an alley, and no witnesses offered help.
The case that arguably started the discussion took place in 2011, when a 2-year-old girl was hit by two vans and pedestrians simply walked by. 

Ultimately, the girl was carried to the side of a road by a street sweeper — a person often seen as at the lowest rungs of society — which further added to the nation’s anguish. 

The girl died a week later in the hospital.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made public "morality" a top priority. 

Online commentators, however, said those efforts had not yet borne fruit.

“There is a lack of citizenship in society,” said Qiao Mu, an independent scholar in Beijing. 

“People feel society is too cold.”

Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said that government policies are to blame. 

Although the government preaches morality, its actions undermine that message.
“You need to pay attention to what our government has been doing,” Mr. Zhang said. 

“Our government sentences a father whose son gets kidney stones after drinking toxic milk powder for petitioning. It also demolishes the libraries set up by nonprofits in the countryside to help poor kids who don’t have a proper education.”