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In China, Video of Deadly Accident Reignites Debate Over Lack of Trust
In China, Video of Deadly Accident Reignites Debate Over Lack of Trust
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 its stirred up a heated discussion is
because many onlookers on site didnt help the victim. The
original video has been viewed 30 million times. On Weibo, Chinas
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:
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 social trust in China,
said in an interview.
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?
But many people reacted differently. The local police announced that
more than a dozen people had called the emergency rescue number,
and some had offered help to the victims family. The police also
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 victims 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 didnt even have to
help her get up she wouldnt have died. If one can leave a society that is this
coldhearted, that may not be a bad thing.
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 nations anguish. The girl died a week
later in the hospital.
Some online commentators, however, said those efforts had not yet
borne fruit.
Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said that government policies are partly to
blame. Although the government preaches morality, its actions often
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 dont have a proper education.