China Mourns Toddler Left for Dead on Busy Street
Girl was run over twice, ignored by 18 passersby in tragedy that has provoked national debate.
| Posted Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, at 2:05 PM ET
Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Images.
The video shows a toddler playing in a street. A truck runs her over, stops momentarily, then drives away. Another truck runs her over, and 18 people pass her before anyone comes to her aid.
The child in the video, which has sparked outrage and soul-searching in China, was a two-year-old girl named Wang Yue, nicknamed "little YueYue" in the Chinese press. After a week in a coma, she died Friday morning.
The hit-and-run, which transpired on Oct. 13 in the city of Foshan, captured the public’s attention when Chinese television stations aired surveillance footage of it. Poignantly, after so many others ignored the bleeding girl, the woman who finally helped her was a poor migrant who had been collecting trash on the street.
Blame has flown on Chinese websites such as the popular microblogging site Weibo. Most agree the bystanders’ apathy was alarming, while some have criticized the girl’s parents for letting her play in the street. Others have sought to tie the news to China’s move toward capitalism and away from religion and traditional morality. According to BBC News, the provincial Communist Party chief said, “We should look into the ugliness in ourselves with a dagger of conscience and bite the soul-searching bullet.”
But some have argued the government is complicit in the ugliness. In 2006, a man named Peng Yu came to the aid of a fallen elderly woman and drove her to a hospital, only to have her wrongly accuse him of knocking her down. A judge in Nanjing ruled him guilty, because “common sense” dictated that only the guilty party would have gone to the trouble to help her.
A writer for Canada’s Globe and Mail referred to that incident in a column headlined, “China’s hit-and-run morality.” But another article in the same paper reports that some Chinese-Canadians believe the Western media have gone too far in using YueYue’s death to make generalizations about Chinese culture.
Stories of bystanders ignoring tragedy aren’t exclusive to China, of course. Americans who recall the 1960s might remember the name Kitty Genovese from a famous case in which a young woman was stabbed to death in Queens, N.Y. as bystanders reportedly looked on from their apartment windows. The case’s details have since been called into question, but the story sparked a flurry of social psychology studies about the “bystander effect.”
