A LITTLE girl left bleeding to death on the side of the street after being struck by two goods vehicles, while 18 people passed her by and did nothing to help.
A woman six months’ pregnant who died during a forced abortion to meet the terms of the one-child policy of population control.
Those who do try to help out of a sense of public-spiritedness face the possibility of being accused of complicity in the initial incident.
This week has left many people in China wondering aloud if rampant economic growth has come at the cost of the country’s humanity. Is China becoming more dehumanised as household incomes increase?
On the social networks, the talk is all of individuals bearing responsibility. “We are all passersby,” is a message regularly posted.
The question is how this message of civic responsibility will go down with a generation reared on principles such as “to get rich is glorious”.
Street-monitoring footage from a market street in the southern city of Foshan shows 18 pedestrians and cyclists passing two-year-old Wang Yue, nicknamed “Yue Yue”, as she lay bleeding to death on the pavement after being hit by two vans. None of the 18 stopped to help. The 19th pedestrian, a migrant worker collecting rubbish, pulled her to the side of the street and alerted the girl’s mother.
Yue Yue succumbed to her terrible wounds after spending a week in a critical condition at a hospital in Guangzhou. Within hours, there were more than 1.9 million posts on a Chinese version of the banned Twitter social network, Sina Weibo, many of them asking where the humanity was in all of this.
“The reason so many people did not help her is not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t dare to. It’s just like the way no one helps elderly people who fall down. The rubbish collector is poor, she has nothing but her conscience, while others are afraid to lose what they have to extortion,” ran one comment on Weibo.
Prof Tan Fang is deputy director of the South China Normal University theoretics department and is founder of chinahaoren.com, a foundation and website that aims to encourage greater civic responsibility.
“On the surface, this looks like the indifference of 18 people, but it reflects deeper social problems. With rapid economic development in the past 30 years, China has promoted materialism, but spiritual civilisation goes beyond this, especially moral education,” says Tan.
“The poor and weak in society long for fairness and warmth, kindness.
On the other hand, some rich people in society became rich by improper or illegal means and became rich quickly. Their values are twisted and they feel they don’t need morality.”
Therefore, he says, some people with no beliefs and a twisted value system can do terrible, unimaginable things.
“The case of Yue Yue is a tragedy rarely seen in China’s history, but it is no accident. Everyone in society needs to own up to responsibility, every local government official, and every individual.”
Wang Yang, a senior Communist Party official from the booming province of Guangdong, China’s economic engine and the province where Foshan is located, told a high-level provincial meeting that the tragedy should be a “wake-up call” for society and that such incidents should not be allowed to occur again.
“We should look into the ugliness in ourselves with a dagger of conscience and bite the soul-searching bullet,” he said, according to Xinhua news agency.
The Communist Party recognises that a spiritual void is emerging from its materialist approach. After all, this is a Marxist-Leninist organisation with materialism at its theoretical core.
The government has introduced efforts to try to encourage greater filial piety, or social responsibility, usually by hijacking some principles from Confucianism. The focus has been on creating a “harmonious society”.
As China becomes wealthier, people want to have a greater say in their individual destinies.
The outpouring of horror over the indifference to the little girl’s plight as she lay bleeding on the street, or for a woman dying even though her only crime was her wish for a second child, has been matched by recognition that being a “good Samaritan” in China is not without complications.
Those helping injured people on the street risk being landed with the hospital costs or, in some cases, being accused of causing the accident.
On Weibo, Li Xiangping, a professor of religion at Huadong university, defended the government and said people needed to bear individual responsibility.
“What, after all, prompted such a sad phenomenon? Officials? The rich? Or is it our own cold-heartedness?” Li wrote.