On Friday, a 2-year-old girl died after being hit by two vehicles in China a week earlier. A video camera recorded the gruesome ordeal on a street nearby the market.
At least 18 people passed right by the girl, Wang Yue, until someone finally moved her to the side of the road and notified her parents.
Some of the bystanders claimed to not have even noticed her, while others were documented doing a double-take of the injured little girl.
According to The Associated Press, Yue died of brain and organ failure at the Guangzhou Military District General Hospital; treatment was ineffective to her severe injuries.
The question isn’t whether she may have survived with earlier help. The real question is a more daunting: Why didn’t anyone do anything?
Apparently, this isn’t the first incident of Chinese passers-by not helping a victim. In the province of Zhejiang, no one attempted to rescue a drowning woman until an American tourist jumped into the water to save her in August, according The San Francisco Chronicle.
The lack of action toward those in danger seems to be a reoccurring trend that experts say is the cause of a few things, two of which are the fear of being blamed and urbanization.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in recent times, intervening bystanders often end up being the accused, such as when the bus driver in the providence of Jiangsu who helped an elderly woman after she was the victim of a hit-and-run. Until surveillance videos proved him innocent, he was blamed as the suspect.
According to The Associated Press, experts claim “unwillingness to help others is an outgrowth of urbanization as migrants pour into cities and create neighborhoods of strangers.”
This is a characteristic that aligns all too well with a Gesellschaft society — the term coined by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies — where society is large and impersonal and where individuals place more emphasis on self-interests rather than societal values.
The worry is that China’s moral structure is deteriorating due to the increasing interest in the country’s politics and economics.
Is it possible for this ethical dilemma to occur in a widespread manner here in the U.S.?
There’d have to be some sort of serious shift in cultural values and norms for that to occur. But with our new-found fascination in the politicking of our country, perhaps this is not that unthinkable.
The sad part is much of this can be prevented if we just have our neighbors over for dinner once in a blue moon. It shouldn’t be that difficult to welcome new neighbors, but in an increasingly self-centered era, maybe this is an old-fashioned idea.
Reach the columnist at alhaines@asu.edu Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
