Ninghua v1.5: December 2011

Source.

The facts of Wang Yue's short life are well recorded, and I will not seek to repeat them. In summary, Wang Yue, a 2 year old toddler, was run down by a vehicle, left injured on the road until a recycling lady found her and called for help. Wang Yue passed away on 21 Sept 2011, 8 days after she was run down.

Naturally the knee jerk reactions of the Guangdong TV news report that was broadcasted and posted on Youku and spread across social networking websites were inevitable. Admittedly, the footage is rather shocking. So much so that CNN's Eunice Yoon and ABC Australia's Stephen McDonell on Lateline declined to show the footage in full to squeamish English speaking Westerners, instead freezing frame before she was hit.

So this is the sorry tale of a toddler wandering off away from her mother, who is distracted. Gets hit by a truck. Truck stops for a while. Then reverses back, running over the girl again. Stops again. Then it goes on ahead.

CCTV camera footage then shows 18 people walk/run/cycle by, with at one stage a mother and her young child walking past. Young child is curious, but mother hastily ushers child away.

Then another truck comes, and drives over the toddler on the ground without stopping. The truck does pause, indicating that the driver was aware that he/she was driving over something. The truck actually bumps up from the ground significantly enough to be shown on the CCTV camera footage.

The child is then left there until the recycling lady (陈贤妹) comes along to look at the rubbish, sees the body of Wang Yue, carries it to one side, and runs around calling for help. The CCTV footage concludes with the mother running into the frame and carrying her daughter away.

Naturally the entire weibo'sphere lit up in indignation, and before long the 人肉搜索 started their own vigilante witch hunt. The shopkeepers along the row of shops got threats. Some of the 18 people who passed by we hunted down on RenRen. Their alleged phone numbers were posted online, and at least one of them gave an interview with 今日早报 to put his side of the story: it was dark, poorly lit and he did not see Wang Yue.

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Closer to home the knee-jerk reactions of the Malaysian online community included lines such as “Are you blind not to see a child on the road?” and “What is wrong with the world nowadays?”. Some of the more moralistic Christians tried to explain it “sin came in, man are weak and thus fall easily to temptation and trails (sic), even if they're at fault, they claim their rights and defend themselves”.

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The media has tried to explain it, from suggestions that the capitalistic growth of China has dulled the senses of the Chinese, the erosion of values during the 文革, the 南京彭宇案, the lack of self-conscience, lurid stories of people being ripped off for helping people, to some anti-China hyper neo-fascists trying to lump 1.4 billion people by extrapolating 18 people from 7.2 million residents of Foshan.

Weibo was filled with shrill cries decrying the Chinese peoples apathy and cruelty, lamenting this as a “shame for all Chinese [that cannot be washed away]” Others on weibo have accused the parents of Wang Yue of neglecting their child. I personally feel that people who pursue this line of argument obviously never had any children. Try keeping an eye on a 2 year old while you're trying to do something. I find herding cats more predictable.

光明日报 suggests that the root of the problem is China's neglect of a moral civilisation. On the 24 Oct 2011 edition of ABC's Lateline, China correspondent Stephen McDonell concluded his report on this matter with “something has gone wrong if you need to impose a fine on people for not doing what should come to them naturally”. To make such a statement, he has shown that he clearly hasn't spent enough time in China.

The concept of a Rule of Law (admittedly a very European concept) doesn't quite exist in Chinese societies, and not necessarily limited to motherland China either. The law in Chinese society has never been much of a mechanism to protect the rights of an individual: rather, it is a burden, that must be circumvented and/or ignored at all costs. For all their 2000 years of history (as the Chinese culturalists love to remind us barbarians), they've never had a system of governance where the society was ruled by counting heads. The power of law came from chopping heads.

My personal stand is that I do not rejoice in the loss of life. I don't celebrate the death of anything. But while I do not encourage it, my upbringing does not allow for it, I can understand why those 18 people walked/cycled/drove by without doing anyting.

Because I have been in their position.

Many years back, while I was much younger and still in Kuching, I left a poor girl crying on a bus stop after she had her handbag stolen.

This was one hot and muggy afternoon in Kuching, where I was waiting for a bus. In what passes for a bus stop in Malaysia，there was another person also waiting. All I heard was a scream, and saw the blur of a man on a motorbike riding away.

Someone had snuck behind the shelter of what passes for a bus shelter in Malaysia, grabbed her handbag, and made off with it. I gave chase, but it was pointless as there is no way I could outrun a motorbike, which turned a corner and disappeared from view.

I went back to the bus stop, and saw the poor girl crying and being consoled by a someone who was not there previously. Just there and then, the bus that I had been waiting for turned up.

I had a choice. I could take the bus, and be on my way to my destination. Or I could miss it, to stay and console the poor girl, missing the bus, and most likely not making to my destination on the day. Remember, this is Kuching. You don't so much catch a bus as rock up to the side of a road and hope something turns up. Which can be anything between a 5 minute and a 2 hour wait.

So I took the bus. And left her there.

If there was CCTV camera footage, I would be a guy who disappeared from the frame, only to reappear flogging down the bus, getting on it and going my way, leaving the poor girl lying there. I would be accused of being heartless, selfish, with no morals, blinded by material wealth, a symbol of a decaying society, and a bastard, by the masses with their knee jerk reactions.

But could I have done anything if I had missed the bus? I had no handphone. Little money on me. I did not see the licence plate of the motorbike. The thief was a blur, and frankly if it was my father I would not have been to identify him either. I could console her. At most, I could have accompanied her to the police station. But what else could I do?

The alternative was after waiting for 45 minutes for a bus was to miss it and wait even longer. How many people would have done that? Ask yourself, how many people, having waited so long for an unreliable bus, would have let it pass?

It is all very easy, in the comfort of your own room behind a keyboard to take the moralistic high ground and unleash vigilante bile on the actors of this play, but when you are in the same position, without the benefit of hindsight, would you have done things differently?

People always have 20/20 vision with hindsight. Rarely do we have such a clear view of what is ahead of us.

Cold hearts? Or simply self-preservation in a society whose motto seems to be “the strong shall leave, and the weak should perish”?

If only life was that simple and straightforward.

Endnote:
It is times like this, that I want to brandish this in front of the Malay nationalists and Chinese culturalists in Malaysia, and shout “You want me to balik Tongsan? You want to balik Tongsan? This is what Tongson looks like!” in their faces.