Ah, so little YueYue – the two year old Wang Yue, has died. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did, what with one car driving over her twice, followed by a van finishing the job. She was crushed, and even if she had survived, she would have been a vegetable.
One thing is to be run over by the same car twice; nobody is saying the driver did it on purpose. Right? No. No matter how you look at Chinese drivers, there is really no incentive for them to kill a two year-old.
No, what has the new caring, sharing, Japan-bashing generation of Chinese* up in arms is that 18 people walked past the dying girl without helping. She was finally dragged out of harm’s way by, typically, a person on the bottom of society, an old scavenger.
A few days after this happened I read in the South China Morning Post that mainland authorities were considering passing, guess what, a new law! This would be a law forcing people to be compassionate. Oh come on! How long have they lived in their own country? Can you imagine how many seconds it would take for some enterprising person to cover himself in ketchup and lie down by the road, forcing people to stop for fear of going to jail if they don’t show compassion, then robbing them at gunpoint or suing them for not being compassionate enough?
Compassion is something that can’t be enforced by law. Even thinking it could, is ludicrous. Especially in the mainland, which is so lawless that any new law that’s passed immediately leads to more opportunities to break the law.
This summer I drove through the entire length of China, not a few kilometres of which by taxi and bus. I was frequently terrified what with my drivers trying to pass other cars at the mouths of tunnels, inside tunnels, going uphill or any totally inappropriate time where I, sitting in the back, could see oncoming cars but the driver apparently could not; with cars hurtling forward at full speed as far as they could before slamming on the brakes 2 mm. from the car ahead.
I thought about how China really doesn’t need any more super-modern eight lane highways as long as her drivers are still sitting on a donkey cart psychologically. China is so busy throwing herself with full speed into what she perceives to be the modern world that she doesn’t care that about 99% of the population are lagging 20 or 30 years behind.
Actually, I’ll say that again. Most of the shocking attitudes we find among the population of China today whether it is tainted food, driving etiquette, corruption, lack of compassion and moral standards in general can be explained in four words: 60 years of Communism.
*And even if the aforementioned caring and sharing generation appears to be on the right track, knowing them, they will find some way of being so over compassionate they will compassion people to death. The Cultural Revolution hasn’t let go of Chinese youth and when they decide to do something, nothing can stop those lemmings from throwing themselves over the cliff throwing casual passers-by before them. They will carry old ladies across the road and into the next town who only wanted to go outside their door for some unfresh air. They will force tourists into taxis, paying for them to go to the Forbidden City just as they’re about to turn in at their hotels. They will cram street sleepers so full of food their stomachs will explode. You’ll see.
When a Chinese friend was telling me about this incident, he said, “Maybe the people in the countryside are better. They still have heart.” Do you think?
I think 60 years of Communism will corrupt the best country-side heart. But of course, living in a small place where everybody knows you and judges your actions is a good instigator to behave a little bit more decently.
It can also be explained by the thinking of the ancient Confucian philosopher Xun Zi, who believed that human nature is essentially evil. This thinking makes people focus on the worst side of a person (either real or imaginary) and disregard the value of the life of a fellow human being.