{"id":10798,"date":"2011-10-19T03:10:26","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T03:10:26","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-10-19T03:10:05","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T03:10:05","slug":"Bystanders-Neglect-of-Injured-Toddler-Sets-Off-Soul-Searching-on-Web-Sites-in-China-","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=10798","title":{"rendered":"Bystanders\u2019 Neglect of Injured Toddler Sets Off Soul-Searching on Web Sites in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday, a van navigating the narrow streets of a hardware market in Foshan, in the southern province of Guangdong, struck and ran over a 2-year-old girl. The driver paused, then drove away. A surveillance camera showed that the toddler lay grievously injured for seven minutes, ignored by at least 18 passers-by, while a second vehicle ran over the child and drove on. A 57-year-old rag collector finally went to her aid. The next day an apparently suicidal woman jumped into a lake in Hangzhou, a city southwest of Shanghai, and began flailing helplessly. A woman widely reported to be an American threw off her coat, swam the 65 feet to the drowning woman and expertly hauled her to shore. And then, seeing she was safe, the rescuer left without giving her name. Neither episode is necessarily representative: many Chinese do help those in dire straits, and, obviously, Americans do not always come to the rescue. But thousands of microbloggers in China have used the juxtaposition of callousness and heroism to fuel a wrenching debate over whether people in their country lack compassion and, if so, why.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

It is the sort of national conversation, increasingly common now, that did not exist before in a land where the printed press and broadcast media largely remain controlled by a Communist Party more interested in directing public opinion than in reflecting on the national mood. \u201cWhat kind of nation is this?\u201d asked one microblogger who called himself Patton Yu. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if an individual\u2019s nature is good or bad, it\u2019s the system that has made us deteriorate.\u201d Said one commentator about the Hangzhou rescue: \u201cYesterday Obama had a beer with out-of-work construction workers. Today, I see a story about an American tourist jumping into the water to save someone. I finally realized why America is such a strong country and will continue to be one.\u201d By Tuesday, more than 9.3 million people had posted comments on the toddler\u2019s accident on Sina\u2019s Weibo, the leading microblog, or Tencent Holdings\u2019 QQ service. Chinese reports on Monday quoted doctors as saying that if the child survived, she was likely to remain in a vegetative state for the remainder of her life. Far fewer commented on the Hangzhou rescue \u2014 in the scores of thousands \u2014 but those who did raised the same ethical concerns about going \u2014 or not going \u2014 to the aid of a fellow Chinese. <\/p>\n

In an unscientific online survey conducted by the Web site ifeng.com \u2014 an arm of the independent Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television \u2014 some 170,000 respondents, who voted on their own initiative, judged by a wide margin that the toddler\u2019s case was proof that the Chinese people\u2019s morals and mutual trust were eroding under the pressures of modern society. Yet the question of compassion in Chinese society is not a new one. In 1894, an American missionary, Arthur H. Smith, wrote an influential book, \u201cChinese Characteristics,\u201d in which a chapter, \u201cThe Absence of Sympathy,\u201d raised similar questions. \u201cUnwillingness to give help to others, unless there is some special reason for doing so, is a trait that runs through Chinese social relations in multifold manifestations,\u201d he wrote.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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