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【纽约时报111017】被撞，濒临死亡的婴儿 无人顾及 引起 中国 良心 问责
Chinese Debate Aiding Strangers After Toddler’s Critical Injury
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
October 17, 2011, 11:15 AM
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/chinese-debate-aiding-strangers-after-toddlers-death/
The accident is terrible to watch.
A toddler, roughly 2 years old, walks absent-mindedly down a narrow street in a market district of Foshan, a large city in southern China, when she is hit by a large white van. The van stops with the child underneath — the driver apparently only aware at that point of what might have happened — but then continues forward, the rear wheels crushing the girl a second time.
Closed-circuit camera footage of the horrible accident, which appears to have occurred on Thursday, has been viewed more than a half-million times in China.
But it was the response of many Chinese — who walked, drove or bicycled past the listless body of the toddler lying in a busy urban street — that has created an uproar and touched off a debate in China about the proper response of passers-by to tragic accidents. [Warning: Video of the accident and its aftermath is extremely disturbing.]
The story rocketed to the top of Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, over the weekend, Shanghaiist reported. Many saw in the casual disregard of those who did not help a symbol of an almost Hobbesian state of struggle, while others argued that Good Samaritans have been punished in the past for intervening in such episodes.
“This society is seriously ill. Even cats and dogs shouldn’t be treated so heartlessly,” one person posted to Sina Weibo, Agence-France Presse reported.
Another poster, named Johnny Yao and quoted by The Daily Telegraph, writes: “Everyone is praising the rubbish-collecting granny for helping, but isn’t it normal to help someone who is wounded or dying? This just shows how abnormal is the moral situation in this society! The sad Chinese, poor China, are we even rescuable?”
For several minutes the child writhes on the ground as more than a dozen people pass by. Some on scooters stop and glance while others simply drive straight by, avoiding the girl, whose injuries appear evident, but doing nothing to help. At one point, an even larger truck appears to drive over her again. Still moving, the girl is then ignored by a mother walking with her own child.
Finally a woman taking out trash picks up the girl and moves her to the side of the road before her distraught parents arrive.
There were conflicting reports on Monday about the status of the girl, identified as Yueyue. Shanghaiist reported that she had succumbed to her head injuries, but others reported that she was still holding on:
Mother of girl run over and ignored in Guangdong market says Yueyue still in ICU, but some sensation in limbs: http://t.co/4AqQKB9v
Mon Oct 17 13:18:59 via web
Mark MacKinnon/马凯
markmackinnon
The Daily Telegraph identified the woman who finally rescued Yueyue as a 58-year-old street cleaner named Chen Xianmei. While some praised her, others lashed out, saying she intervened only to seek out the spotlight, according to a review of Weibo postings by Storyful.
It is not the first time suspicion has fallen on a Good Samaritan in China. The Xinhua news agency linked the episode to a perception of declining morals “as profit and materialism are perceived to be affecting society’s values”:
A strong chorus of opinion on the Internet says laws should exempt Samaritans from liability, yet laws themselves cannot solve society’s morality dilemma.
Cao Lin, a China Youth Daily commentator, said in a signed article published on Monday that the worry of liability should not be an excuse for not helping, and this case exposes the decline of humanity in Chinese society.
Less than two months ago, a bus driver was falsely accused by passers-by of knocking down an elderly woman in the middle of Nantong city after he stopped to help the woman, who was lying on the ground. The 81-year-old woman apologized to the driver, Yin Hongbin, but the news ricocheted around the Chinese press. The state-run China Daily headlined: “False charges deter lending elderly hand.”
“According to Yin, the woman cried ’someone please help me’ when he approached her. After he had got the woman to stand up, a villager passed by and accused him of knocking her down,” the paper reported. “The woman, though, told the villager ‘it’s not him’ and let him go.”
In January, China Daily highlighted the need for better protection for Good Samaritans in China with an anecdote:
After falling in a downtown street and lying on the cold pavement, face down, for half an hour, during which no passers-by moved to help him, an 83-year-old man died. Hearing this story, what would you call this society? Cold-hearted?
In fact, the pedestrians in the southern China city of Fuzhou wanted to help when they found the old man lying on the ground last Wednesday. Two women tried to help the old man up. But one of the onlookers said: “Better not touch him. It will be hard for you to put it clearly later on.”
The two women hesitated and finally stood up. Using their cellphone, they called the police and first-aid center. But by the time the ambulance arrived, the old man had died.
The problem, according to the writer, Liu Shinan, a high-ranking editor at the paper, is that many in China worry that they will be found liable for the injuries that they are seeking to alleviate.
The fear is not unfounded: in 2006, a man who helped an elderly woman to the hospital was dragged to court by her family and later made to pay a large share of her medical bills, Mr. Liu writes:
The verdict said that “according to common sense,” it was highly possible that the defendant had bumped into the old woman, given that he was the first person to get off the bus when the old woman was pushed down in front of the bus door and, “according to what one would normally do in this case,” Peng would have left soon after sending the woman to the hospital instead of staying there for the surgical check. “His behavior obviously went against common sense.”
This “reasoning” horrified, and angered, the whole nation. From then on, the number of pedestrians helping old people in need has signifcantly decreased. Using search engines online, one can get dozens of stories of old people left lying on the ground without any passers-by giving a helping hand. Netizens have even coined a new phrase for it – “sequel of the Peng Yu case.” |
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狗仔卡
楼主
提升卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
发表于 2011-10-18 13:59