What is wrong with China? Shocking video shows scores leaving injured woman to die on busy road
A speeding taxi knocks the pedestrian off her feet, sending her hurtling through the air.
Dozens of people stand gawking or walk past, as if the young woman sprawled in the busy intersection simply doesn’t exist.
A full minute passes. Then another vehicle, this time an SUV, rolls over the prone woman. Her unconscious body churns under its wheels like a sack of offal.
After a video of the traffic accident in the city of Zhumadian surfaced on Chinese social media this past week, the initial reaction was one of outrage directed at the more than 40 pedestrians and drivers who passed within metres of the woman, all failing to offer help.
Warning: This video is deeply disturbing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AV3M0gp66Q
But for many Chinese, the video was something more: a 94-second reminder of what many see as a society rotting from the inside.
Even as China presents itself outwardly as a prosperous and rising power, around kitchen tables and on WeChat, the state-supervised version of Twitter – Chinese routinely grumble about a nation that is morally and ethically bankrupt.
When it comes to two qualities – suzhi, or “personal character,” and dixian, literally “bottom line” – the sense is that the basic principle of right and wrong no longer applies.
The common lament is of an unmoored country, a place where manufacturers knowingly sell toxic baby formula and fraudulent children’s vaccines, where corruption is rife and human life has no value.
“It’s a problem with the entire country: our moral bottom line has fallen so low,” said Tian You, a novelist based in the southeastern city of Shenzhen.
“If I’m truly honest, I wonder, would I myself have dared to help the woman?”
After the Zhumadian video surfaced this week, garnering more than five million views in its first 24 hours before being censored, local police were forced to disclose that the accident took place weeks earlier, on April 21.
The woman, whose family name was Ma, did not survive.
The only detail police were prepared to release is that the two drivers who hit her are held “under investigation”.
-AAP