Since the surveillance video of a 2-year-old girl, named Yue Yuem, being hit by a van on October 13 in the city of Foshan, China aired on a Chinese television newscast in early October, it has been posted and reposted on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and is sparking a great deal of attention and debate.
The controversial video shows five electric bike riders passing by the body of the small tricycle rider, lying prone in the street after being struck by a truck. Three other people later walk by on the sidewalk; all choose to ignore little Yue Yuem. She lays there, unaided, until she is eventually run over a second time by another truck. Several minutes after getting hit by the second truck a 57-year-old rag collector notices the girl and moves her to the curb. She then asks shopkeepers around the street if they know who the girl is; she is told to mind her own business by several of them. The rag collector then walks away from Yue Yuem. In total, 18 people passed by or saw Yue Yuem and did not help.
Several seconds after the disappearance of the rag collector the girl’s mother appears and rushes away with the girl taking her to a hospital. Yue Yuem received emergency surgery and lingered a coma for several weeks before being pronounced brain dead. She died on October 16 because she could not breathe on her own.
Before turning himself into the police, the second driver in the October 13 tragedy gave the media his response to the incident, “If she was dead, I may have had to pay about 200,000 yuan ($3,125.) But if she was injured, it may have cost me even more.“ The driver of the first truck has yet to be found.
Looking through the hundreds of comments posted about this video on Facebook and YouTube, I found several ridiculous comments blaming the incident on China being a communistic country. Get real people! Humanitarian tragedies such as this can happen in all parts of the world. Right here in the United States, for example, in February 2009 CNN aired a video of a homeless man being beaten on a street in Washington D.C. He then was left lying there for 20 minutes before someone eventually called 911. The man later died in the hospital. Tragedies like this can happen anywhere in the world, living in a communistic country has nothing to do with the ignorance of avoiding a stranger in distress.
Events like these show how many people, communist or otherwise, lack a moral education. Or maybe I am wrong, maybe the economy in China is so terrible the drivers really didn’t have the amount of money necessary to save a little girl or to pay for her funeral expenses; however, that doesn’t explain why none of the bystanders would stop to help. Perhaps the bystanders believed they would be blamed for the event, even if it meant saving a life? And perhaps the people on the crowded Washington D.C street in 2009 were afraid of their own safety? The end result is the same. In both situations a person died alone and unaided by his or her fellow man.
Any excuse reflects the sad state of humanitarianism, not the nationality and ideology of the people making excuses. A life is a life. No matter what the cost of saving one is.
