„In the West, law, faith and morality are a three-legged stool.“<\/b>
\nIn more than 12 years of writing\u00a0about news events\u00a0online, I\u2019 ve seen a lot of disturbing videos. Scenes of chaos and violence are not hard to find in the war on terror era or whatever we\u2019 re now calling the global conflict with radical Islam. If you\u2019 ve seen some of the theatrical murders staged and filmed by ISIS, you know what I\u2019 m talking about. But the most disturbing video I\u2019 ve ever seen wasn\u2019 t the result of a terror attack or an air strike or a mass shooting. It didn\u2019 t involve bombs or bullets. It was a 2011 video from China\u00a0showing a 2-year-old being run over by a truck. And as the helpless child died in the street, no one came to help.
Recently, a similar video went viral in China, racking up 5 million views before it was censored by the government. It shows a woman being hit by a taxi. She goes flying and winds up lying in the street. There are dozens of pedestrians who see the accident from just a few dozen feet away. Some of them look at her as they cross the street near her unmoving body, but none of them stop or try to help her. At one point, the woman\u2019s head comes up off the pavement. She is still alive. And still, no one helps her. Eventually, she is run over by another car, a large SUV that\u00a0stops a few feet past her body. The driver opens her door and appears to talk to another woman who finally walks toward the body in the street.
The woman in the video died and the two drivers who ran her over are reportedly being investigated. But, like the previous video, what is shocking here\u00a0is not the initial accident. Those happen everywhere. It\u2019s the casual indifference that follows. There are lots of people right there who could stop to help but none of them do. The Associated Press reports that it has led many in China to wonder what, exactly, is wrong with their society:
Here, the common refrain goes, is an unmoored country where manufacturers knowingly sell toxic baby formula and fraudulent children\u2019s vaccines. Restaurants cook with recycled \u201cgutter oil\u201d and grocery stores peddle fake eggs, fake fruit, even fake rice. Many Chinese say they 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 \u2014 perhaps explaining the Zhumadian incident\u2026
\u201cIn the West, law, faith and morality are a three-legged stool, \u201d said Ma Ai, a sociologist at the China University of Political Science and Law. \u201cOur legal system is catching up, but we don\u2019 t have religion and a new moral system has not established after China transformed away from a traditional, collectivist society.\u201d\u2026
In 2009, the People\u2019s Daily, the Communist Party\u2019s official mouthpiece, ran a provocative story with a picture of a dog standing by another injured dog in a busy street and pondered whether humans would do the same. The report was headlined, \u201cDo Chinese people lack compassion?\u201d
A 2014 state media poll found that Chinese thought \u201clacking faith and ethics\u201d was the No. 1 social problem, followed by \u201cbeing a bystander or being selfish.\u201d
I\u2019 ve heard plenty of sermons on the Good Samaritan over the years. It\u2019s a parable in which the familiar, respectable religious people leave a man to die on the side of the road while a man from a culture that was widely despised at the time stops and helps the stranger. One of the lessons of the parable is that goodness transcends borders and cultures. But maybe that\u2019s not always the case. There don\u2019 t seem to be many good Samaritans on the streets in China, only people who see a woman dying and keep walking. How do you begin\u00a0to fix something like that?
Tags: China good Samaritan law morality religion
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