-
IP addresses are NOT logged in this forum so there's no point asking. Please note that this forum is full of homophobes, racists, lunatics, schizophrenics & absolute nut jobs with a smattering of geniuses, Chinese chauvinists, Moderate Muslims and last but not least a couple of "know-it-alls" constantly sprouting their dubious wisdom. If you believe that content generated by unsavory characters might cause you offense PLEASE LEAVE NOW! Sammyboy Admin and Staff are not responsible for your hurt feelings should you choose to read any of the content here. The OTHER forum is HERE so please stop asking.
Chitchat Boss was Right. Ang Moh bestest.
- Thread starter kelvin
- Start date
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2008
- Messages
- 80,511
- Points
- 113
He probably pushed the girl in.ex girl friend. Use and discard.
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2008
- Messages
- 60,263
- Points
- 113
tiongs will just stand, watch, point fingers, and criticize angmoh for being foolish.
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2008
- Messages
- 80,511
- Points
- 113
And for denying her the " right to die" from suicide.
If its sinkie, they would just take a pic or do a recording and post "live" on social media.
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
In ah tiong land the golden rule is dont help n dont save anyone in distress. Because there is no good samaritan law there. N most saviours get sued as a way of wealth generation by the victims family. This dumbass ang mor just got himself open to huge liabilities. But since he has diplomat immunity . He should b ok. He is not a commoner
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
China praises British diplomat for saving drowning woman
British diplomat in Chongqing rescues woman from river
British diplomat Consul General Stephen Ellison jumped into a river in Chongqing to rescue a woman who had fallen in. (Screengrabs: Twitter/ukinchina)
17 Nov 2020 05:46PM
Bookmark
BEIJING: Beijing on Tuesday (Nov 17) praised a British diplomat who was filmed diving into a river in southern China to save a drowning student, a rare warm moment between two countries at loggerheads over human rights.
Britain's mission in the southwestern city of Chongqing said on Monday that Consul General Stephen Ellison leapt into action at the weekend to save a woman who had fallen into a river coursing through a nearby tourist town.
The video on Chinese social media – viewed more than 170 million times in China – shows Ellison pulling off his shoes and jumping in to rescue the woman, who was floating face down.
"I think he should be commended for his act of bravery. I'd like to give him a big, big thumbs up," said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a routine briefing on Tuesday.
Ellison's actions also earned praise from British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who tweeted: "His bravery and commitment demonstrates the very best of British diplomats around the world."
The 61-year-old former engineer had only recently been appointed to the role in the southern metropolis after serving for years at the main embassy in Beijing, and is an accomplished triathlete, according to local media reports.
The praise comes at a time of increased tension in the UK-China relationship, as Britain has frequently criticised China over its human rights record on issues including Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and barred Huawei from its domestic 5G networks.
Source: AFP/dv
British diplomat in Chongqing rescues woman from river
British diplomat Consul General Stephen Ellison jumped into a river in Chongqing to rescue a woman who had fallen in. (Screengrabs: Twitter/ukinchina)
17 Nov 2020 05:46PM
Bookmark
BEIJING: Beijing on Tuesday (Nov 17) praised a British diplomat who was filmed diving into a river in southern China to save a drowning student, a rare warm moment between two countries at loggerheads over human rights.
Britain's mission in the southwestern city of Chongqing said on Monday that Consul General Stephen Ellison leapt into action at the weekend to save a woman who had fallen into a river coursing through a nearby tourist town.
The video on Chinese social media – viewed more than 170 million times in China – shows Ellison pulling off his shoes and jumping in to rescue the woman, who was floating face down.
"I think he should be commended for his act of bravery. I'd like to give him a big, big thumbs up," said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a routine briefing on Tuesday.
Ellison's actions also earned praise from British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who tweeted: "His bravery and commitment demonstrates the very best of British diplomats around the world."
The 61-year-old former engineer had only recently been appointed to the role in the southern metropolis after serving for years at the main embassy in Beijing, and is an accomplished triathlete, according to local media reports.
The praise comes at a time of increased tension in the UK-China relationship, as Britain has frequently criticised China over its human rights record on issues including Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and barred Huawei from its domestic 5G networks.
Source: AFP/dv
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
Do not b a good samaritan in ah tiongs land. U have been warned
Why Drivers in China Intentionally Kill the Pedestrians They Hit
Sept 04, 20154:48 AM
Hkg741386
Look both ways: Pedestrians wait for the light to change in central Beijing on Sept. 18, 2007. Photo by Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty Images
In April a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time. When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”
It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common; security cameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead. The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon: “It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.”
This 2008 television report features security camera footage of a dusty white Passat reversing at high speed and smashing into a 64-year-old grandmother. The Passat’s back wheels bounce up over her head and body. The driver, Zhao Xiao Cheng, stops the car for a moment then hits the gas, causing his front wheels to roll over the woman. Then Zhao shifts into drive, wheels grinding the woman into the pavement. Zhao is not done. Twice more he shifts back and forth between drive and reverse, each time thudding over the grandmother’s body. He then speeds away from her corpse.
Incredibly, Zhao was found not guilty of intentional homicide. Accepting Zhao’s claim that he thought he was driving over a trash bag, the court of Taizhou in Zhejiang province sentenced him to just three years in prison for “negligence.” Zhao’s case was unusual only in that it was caught on video. As the television anchor noted, “You can see online an endless stream of stories talking about cases similar to this one.”
“Double-hit cases” have been around for decades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common.
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.
In 2010 in Xinyi, video captured a wealthy young man reversing his BMW X6 out of a parking spot. He hits a 3-year-old boy, knocking the child to the ground and rolling over his skull. The driver then shifts his BMW into drive and crushes the child again. Remarkably, the driver then gets out of the BMW, puts the vehicle in reverse, and guides it with his hand as he walks the vehicle backward over the boy’s crumpled body. The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive again, running over the boy one last time as he drives away.
Here too, the driver was charged only with accidentally causing a person’s death. (He claimed to have confused the boy with a cardboard box or trash bag.) Police rejected charges of murder and even of fleeing the scene of the crime, ignoring the fact that the driver ran over the boy’s head as he sped away.
These drivers are willing to kill not only because it is cheaper, but also because they expect to escape murder charges. In the days before video cameras became widespread, it was rare to have evidence that a driver hit the victim twice. Even in today’s age of cellphone cameras, drivers seem confident that they can either bribe local officials or hire a lawyer to evade murder charges.
Perhaps the most horrific of these hit-to-kill cases are the ones in which the initial collision didn’t injure the victim seriously, and yet the driver came back and killed the victim anyway. In Sichuan province, an enormous, dirt-encrusted truck knocked down a 2-year-old boy. The toddler was only dazed by the initial blow, and immediately climbed to his feet. Eyewitnesses said that the boy went to fetch his umbrella, which had been thrown across the street by the impact, when the truck reversed and crushed him, this time killing him.
Despite the eyewitness testimony, the county chief of police declared that the truck had never reversed, never hit the boy a second time, and that the wheels never rolled over the child. Meanwhile, one outraged website posted photographs appearing to show the child’s body under the truck’s front wheel.
In each of these cases, despite video and photographs showing that the driver hit the victim a second, and often even a third, fourth, and fifth time, the drivers ended up paying the same or less in compensation and jail time than they would have if they had merely injured the victim.
With so many hit-to-kill drivers escaping serious punishment, the Chinese public has sometimes taken matters into its own hands. In 2013 a crowd in Zhengzhou in Henan province beat a wealthy driver who killed a 6-year-old after allegedly running him over twice. (A television report claims the crowd had acted on “false rumors.” However, at least five witnesses assert on camera that the man had run over the child a second time.)
Of course, not every hit-to-kill driver escapes serious punishment. A man named Yao Jiaxin who in 2010 hit a bicyclist in Xian and returned to make sure she was dead—even stabbing the injured woman with a knife—was convicted and executed. In 2014 a driver named Zhang Qingda who had hit an elderly man in Jiayu Pass in Gansu province with his pickup truck and circled around to crush the man again was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Both China and Taiwan have passed laws attempting to eradicate hit-to-kill cases. Taiwan’s legislature reformed Article 6 of its Civil Code, which had long restricted the ability to bring civil lawsuits on behalf of others (such as a person killed in a traffic accident). Meanwhile, China’s legislature has emphasized that multiple-hit cases should be treated as murders. Yet even when a driver hits a victim multiple times, it can be hard to prove intent and causation—at least to the satisfaction of China’s courts. Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects.
Hit-to-kill cases continue, and hit-to-kill drivers regularly escape serious punishment. In January a woman was caught on video repeatedly driving over an old man who had slipped in the snow. In April a school bus driver in Shuangcheng was accused of driving over a 5-year-old girl again and again. In May a security camera filmed a truck driver running over a young boy four times; the driver claimed that he had never noticed the child.
And last month the unlicensed woman who had killed the 2-year-old in the fruit market with her BMW—and then offered to bribe the family—was brought to court. She claimed the killing was an accident. Prosecutors accepted her assertion, and recommended that the court reduce her sentence to two to four years in prison.
This light sentence would still be more of a punishment than many drivers have received for similar crimes. But it probably won’t be enough to keep the next driver from putting his car in reverse and hitting the gas.
Why Drivers in China Intentionally Kill the Pedestrians They Hit
Sept 04, 20154:48 AM
Hkg741386
Look both ways: Pedestrians wait for the light to change in central Beijing on Sept. 18, 2007. Photo by Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty Images
In April a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time. When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”
It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common; security cameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead. The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon: “It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.”
This 2008 television report features security camera footage of a dusty white Passat reversing at high speed and smashing into a 64-year-old grandmother. The Passat’s back wheels bounce up over her head and body. The driver, Zhao Xiao Cheng, stops the car for a moment then hits the gas, causing his front wheels to roll over the woman. Then Zhao shifts into drive, wheels grinding the woman into the pavement. Zhao is not done. Twice more he shifts back and forth between drive and reverse, each time thudding over the grandmother’s body. He then speeds away from her corpse.
Incredibly, Zhao was found not guilty of intentional homicide. Accepting Zhao’s claim that he thought he was driving over a trash bag, the court of Taizhou in Zhejiang province sentenced him to just three years in prison for “negligence.” Zhao’s case was unusual only in that it was caught on video. As the television anchor noted, “You can see online an endless stream of stories talking about cases similar to this one.”
“Double-hit cases” have been around for decades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common.
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.
In 2010 in Xinyi, video captured a wealthy young man reversing his BMW X6 out of a parking spot. He hits a 3-year-old boy, knocking the child to the ground and rolling over his skull. The driver then shifts his BMW into drive and crushes the child again. Remarkably, the driver then gets out of the BMW, puts the vehicle in reverse, and guides it with his hand as he walks the vehicle backward over the boy’s crumpled body. The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive again, running over the boy one last time as he drives away.
Here too, the driver was charged only with accidentally causing a person’s death. (He claimed to have confused the boy with a cardboard box or trash bag.) Police rejected charges of murder and even of fleeing the scene of the crime, ignoring the fact that the driver ran over the boy’s head as he sped away.
These drivers are willing to kill not only because it is cheaper, but also because they expect to escape murder charges. In the days before video cameras became widespread, it was rare to have evidence that a driver hit the victim twice. Even in today’s age of cellphone cameras, drivers seem confident that they can either bribe local officials or hire a lawyer to evade murder charges.
Perhaps the most horrific of these hit-to-kill cases are the ones in which the initial collision didn’t injure the victim seriously, and yet the driver came back and killed the victim anyway. In Sichuan province, an enormous, dirt-encrusted truck knocked down a 2-year-old boy. The toddler was only dazed by the initial blow, and immediately climbed to his feet. Eyewitnesses said that the boy went to fetch his umbrella, which had been thrown across the street by the impact, when the truck reversed and crushed him, this time killing him.
Despite the eyewitness testimony, the county chief of police declared that the truck had never reversed, never hit the boy a second time, and that the wheels never rolled over the child. Meanwhile, one outraged website posted photographs appearing to show the child’s body under the truck’s front wheel.
In each of these cases, despite video and photographs showing that the driver hit the victim a second, and often even a third, fourth, and fifth time, the drivers ended up paying the same or less in compensation and jail time than they would have if they had merely injured the victim.
With so many hit-to-kill drivers escaping serious punishment, the Chinese public has sometimes taken matters into its own hands. In 2013 a crowd in Zhengzhou in Henan province beat a wealthy driver who killed a 6-year-old after allegedly running him over twice. (A television report claims the crowd had acted on “false rumors.” However, at least five witnesses assert on camera that the man had run over the child a second time.)
Of course, not every hit-to-kill driver escapes serious punishment. A man named Yao Jiaxin who in 2010 hit a bicyclist in Xian and returned to make sure she was dead—even stabbing the injured woman with a knife—was convicted and executed. In 2014 a driver named Zhang Qingda who had hit an elderly man in Jiayu Pass in Gansu province with his pickup truck and circled around to crush the man again was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Both China and Taiwan have passed laws attempting to eradicate hit-to-kill cases. Taiwan’s legislature reformed Article 6 of its Civil Code, which had long restricted the ability to bring civil lawsuits on behalf of others (such as a person killed in a traffic accident). Meanwhile, China’s legislature has emphasized that multiple-hit cases should be treated as murders. Yet even when a driver hits a victim multiple times, it can be hard to prove intent and causation—at least to the satisfaction of China’s courts. Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects.
Hit-to-kill cases continue, and hit-to-kill drivers regularly escape serious punishment. In January a woman was caught on video repeatedly driving over an old man who had slipped in the snow. In April a school bus driver in Shuangcheng was accused of driving over a 5-year-old girl again and again. In May a security camera filmed a truck driver running over a young boy four times; the driver claimed that he had never noticed the child.
And last month the unlicensed woman who had killed the 2-year-old in the fruit market with her BMW—and then offered to bribe the family—was brought to court. She claimed the killing was an accident. Prosecutors accepted her assertion, and recommended that the court reduce her sentence to two to four years in prison.
This light sentence would still be more of a punishment than many drivers have received for similar crimes. But it probably won’t be enough to keep the next driver from putting his car in reverse and hitting the gas.
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
Did Chinese laws keep strangers from helping toddler hit by truck?
Chen Xianmei (right) a 57-year-old trash collector and part-time cook from the southern Chinese city of Qingyuan, removed the toddler, Yueyue, after at least a dozen passersby ignored her lifeless body in the middle of a Foshan wholesale market.
By Josh TapperStaff Reporter
Tue., Oct. 18, 2011timer2 min. read
After a Chinese toddler was run over by a car and left for dead by passersby in a Foshan market, some are suggesting China’s legal system may deter Good Samaritans from helping accident victims.
A video culled from surveillance footage and posted on YouTube and its Chinese equivalent, Youku, shows a van driver striking the 2-year-old girl, pausing with his vehicle straddling the girl’s torso, then driving forward, running her over a second time with his back wheel.
None of the 18 people who saw the 2-year-old’s bloody body stopped to help. The girl, named Yueyue, was then run over again by a light-duty truck.
In Ontario, among other places, a Good Samaritan Act protects from liability those who aren’t health care professionals who perform first aid on a victim at the scene of an accident. In many European countries, such as France and Germany, Good Samaritan laws impose on citizens a duty to rescue.
In China, neither type of law exists, says Pitman Potter, a law professor and Hong Kong Bank Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia.
“That kind of system dissuades people from helping,” Potter said. “People have been either sued by the family of the injured person or held responsible by local authorities for the harm, and so getting wrapped up in that is something people want to avoid.”
In 2006, a Nanjing man who escorted an elderly woman to the hospital after she broke her leg was ordered to pay 40 per cent of the woman’s medical bill. The rationale: It was inconceivable that the man would go to such lengths to help the woman if he wasn’t somehow responsible for her injury.
“The reasoning of the courts is that if you hadn’t done it, why would you have taken them to the hospital? No normal person would have taken them,” said Donald Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University who maintains a blog on Chinese law.
Some Chinese sources also suggest the van’s driver left the girl to die because compensatory damages for death are often less than for a long-term injury. For the latter, damages might include medical expenses and income compensation for missed-work time over many years. Death involves a one-off payment.
“If she is dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan ($3,180),” the van driver told the China Daily before he surrendered to police. “But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan.”
China introduced compulsory car insurance five years ago. But an article in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post earlier this year said many drivers ignore the requirement.
According to Potter, personal liability insurance is also uncommon, meaning it would be financially prudent for a driver to flee an accident.
Some Chinese social media users have called the general indifference toward the girl a sign of a deteriorating moral society.
“This society is seriously ill,” commented one poster on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo. “Even cats and dogs shouldn’t be treated so heartlessly.”
Chen Xianmei (right) a 57-year-old trash collector and part-time cook from the southern Chinese city of Qingyuan, removed the toddler, Yueyue, after at least a dozen passersby ignored her lifeless body in the middle of a Foshan wholesale market.
By Josh TapperStaff Reporter
Tue., Oct. 18, 2011timer2 min. read
After a Chinese toddler was run over by a car and left for dead by passersby in a Foshan market, some are suggesting China’s legal system may deter Good Samaritans from helping accident victims.
A video culled from surveillance footage and posted on YouTube and its Chinese equivalent, Youku, shows a van driver striking the 2-year-old girl, pausing with his vehicle straddling the girl’s torso, then driving forward, running her over a second time with his back wheel.
None of the 18 people who saw the 2-year-old’s bloody body stopped to help. The girl, named Yueyue, was then run over again by a light-duty truck.
In Ontario, among other places, a Good Samaritan Act protects from liability those who aren’t health care professionals who perform first aid on a victim at the scene of an accident. In many European countries, such as France and Germany, Good Samaritan laws impose on citizens a duty to rescue.
In China, neither type of law exists, says Pitman Potter, a law professor and Hong Kong Bank Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia.
“That kind of system dissuades people from helping,” Potter said. “People have been either sued by the family of the injured person or held responsible by local authorities for the harm, and so getting wrapped up in that is something people want to avoid.”
In 2006, a Nanjing man who escorted an elderly woman to the hospital after she broke her leg was ordered to pay 40 per cent of the woman’s medical bill. The rationale: It was inconceivable that the man would go to such lengths to help the woman if he wasn’t somehow responsible for her injury.
“The reasoning of the courts is that if you hadn’t done it, why would you have taken them to the hospital? No normal person would have taken them,” said Donald Clarke, a law professor at George Washington University who maintains a blog on Chinese law.
Some Chinese sources also suggest the van’s driver left the girl to die because compensatory damages for death are often less than for a long-term injury. For the latter, damages might include medical expenses and income compensation for missed-work time over many years. Death involves a one-off payment.
“If she is dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan ($3,180),” the van driver told the China Daily before he surrendered to police. “But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan.”
China introduced compulsory car insurance five years ago. But an article in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post earlier this year said many drivers ignore the requirement.
According to Potter, personal liability insurance is also uncommon, meaning it would be financially prudent for a driver to flee an accident.
Some Chinese social media users have called the general indifference toward the girl a sign of a deteriorating moral society.
“This society is seriously ill,” commented one poster on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo. “Even cats and dogs shouldn’t be treated so heartlessly.”
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
4/31: Why people won’t normally help you in an accident in China? | by Fernando Mata Licón | Shanghai Living | Medium
Fernando Mata Licón
One of my biggest cultural shocks in China was watching someone having an accident, but not being able to help them.
While I love China so far and Chinese people have been really nice to me, most of the time, there are some cultural shocks that are not easy to ignore. Helping others is one of them.
Three weeks ago I went to a soccer match between Shanghai SIPG and FC Seoul. After the game the traffic around the area was quite heavy. I was waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green when a couple in their electric scooter went through a red light, an old lady hit them and the three of them fell to the ground. The couple got up, yelled something to the old lady and then just got on the scooter and left. The old lady stayed there for some minutes while people passing by didn’t even try to help her.
This may be a weird situation for a foreigner who hasn’t been in China before, but it’s a normal thing to see here. When an accident occurs, people would not try to help others and would try to avoid any contact with the people involved in it.
While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.
The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.
While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. If you help someone it’s because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.
After the incident more cases like this appeared, usually with old people involved and suing their helpers because “if you weren’t responsible, why would you stopped to help me”. So people just stopped helping each other.
There were a couple of extreme cases where Chinese people refusing to help led to the death of the person in need. Such is the case of Wang Yue, a two year old girl who was wandering alone in a narrow alley, because her mother was busy doing the laundry. She was ran over by two cars, and 18 people who passed around the area didn’t even look at her. Later a public anonymous survey revealed that 71% thought that the people who passed by didn’t stop to help her because they were afraid of getting into trouble.
That’s not the only case in 2011 an 88 year old Chinese man fell in the street and broke his nose, while people passed him by no one helped him and he died suffocating in his own blood. After some anonymous poll the result was the same, the people didn’t blame those who didn’t help, because the recent cases show that if you try to help someone you can get into trouble.
Other cases were solved thanks to the constant vigilance in China. In 2013 Wang Lan, a Chinese woman from the Liaoning province, was getting off the bus when she saw an old lady who fell because someone pushed her. Wang helped the old lady, called her family and then accompanied them to the hospital. She even paid the ¥200 for the medicine expenses of the old lady. After the accident she received a call where the lady was suing her because, in her words “When I was getting off the bus, she was the one closest to me” and “If it wasn’t you who bumped into me, why would you have helped take me to the hospital?”. The amount was ¥40,000 (~5,800 USD).
Lan’s lawyer used the public transport cameras to show that Wang wasn’t the one responsible of the accident, and so she won the case, but still the experience hit Lang’s good faith on helping others. This kind of cases are the ones that make Chinese people more indifferent to accident. It’s just a way to protect themselves.
While in recent years there have been some programs made by the government to improve this situation the general rule is not to help, why would you get in trouble for helping someone you don’t know.
From anecdotes and personal experiences this situation is even harder for foreigners in China, who most of the time would find themselves guilty of situations that they didn’t start like fights or discussions with local people. The rule of thumb is that if a foreigner is involved in a trouble, it would be his fault.
So even when it’s hard to just pass by when someone is in need, the experience and cases just prove that maybe China is not the place to do it yet.
This is one of the sad parts of the Chinese culture, which is very unfortunate in some way because my experience with some of them has been great and I can tell that they’re good hearted people, but some situations have pushed them to act in this way.
This story is part of my 31/31 challenge. Following a friend’s idea I will publish at least one story every day for the next month.
If you see any error please let me know, the idea is to stop over-reviewing my stories before publishing them.
If you liked it be sure to show me your love clicking the
below. And you can also subscribe to my new publications Shanghai Living and Lost Facts.
You can connect with me via Twitter following me at @fernandlicon.
Fernando Mata Licón
One of my biggest cultural shocks in China was watching someone having an accident, but not being able to help them.
While I love China so far and Chinese people have been really nice to me, most of the time, there are some cultural shocks that are not easy to ignore. Helping others is one of them.
Three weeks ago I went to a soccer match between Shanghai SIPG and FC Seoul. After the game the traffic around the area was quite heavy. I was waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green when a couple in their electric scooter went through a red light, an old lady hit them and the three of them fell to the ground. The couple got up, yelled something to the old lady and then just got on the scooter and left. The old lady stayed there for some minutes while people passing by didn’t even try to help her.
This may be a weird situation for a foreigner who hasn’t been in China before, but it’s a normal thing to see here. When an accident occurs, people would not try to help others and would try to avoid any contact with the people involved in it.
While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.
The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.
While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. If you help someone it’s because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.
After the incident more cases like this appeared, usually with old people involved and suing their helpers because “if you weren’t responsible, why would you stopped to help me”. So people just stopped helping each other.
There were a couple of extreme cases where Chinese people refusing to help led to the death of the person in need. Such is the case of Wang Yue, a two year old girl who was wandering alone in a narrow alley, because her mother was busy doing the laundry. She was ran over by two cars, and 18 people who passed around the area didn’t even look at her. Later a public anonymous survey revealed that 71% thought that the people who passed by didn’t stop to help her because they were afraid of getting into trouble.
That’s not the only case in 2011 an 88 year old Chinese man fell in the street and broke his nose, while people passed him by no one helped him and he died suffocating in his own blood. After some anonymous poll the result was the same, the people didn’t blame those who didn’t help, because the recent cases show that if you try to help someone you can get into trouble.
Other cases were solved thanks to the constant vigilance in China. In 2013 Wang Lan, a Chinese woman from the Liaoning province, was getting off the bus when she saw an old lady who fell because someone pushed her. Wang helped the old lady, called her family and then accompanied them to the hospital. She even paid the ¥200 for the medicine expenses of the old lady. After the accident she received a call where the lady was suing her because, in her words “When I was getting off the bus, she was the one closest to me” and “If it wasn’t you who bumped into me, why would you have helped take me to the hospital?”. The amount was ¥40,000 (~5,800 USD).
Lan’s lawyer used the public transport cameras to show that Wang wasn’t the one responsible of the accident, and so she won the case, but still the experience hit Lang’s good faith on helping others. This kind of cases are the ones that make Chinese people more indifferent to accident. It’s just a way to protect themselves.
While in recent years there have been some programs made by the government to improve this situation the general rule is not to help, why would you get in trouble for helping someone you don’t know.
From anecdotes and personal experiences this situation is even harder for foreigners in China, who most of the time would find themselves guilty of situations that they didn’t start like fights or discussions with local people. The rule of thumb is that if a foreigner is involved in a trouble, it would be his fault.
So even when it’s hard to just pass by when someone is in need, the experience and cases just prove that maybe China is not the place to do it yet.
This is one of the sad parts of the Chinese culture, which is very unfortunate in some way because my experience with some of them has been great and I can tell that they’re good hearted people, but some situations have pushed them to act in this way.
This story is part of my 31/31 challenge. Following a friend’s idea I will publish at least one story every day for the next month.
If you see any error please let me know, the idea is to stop over-reviewing my stories before publishing them.
If you liked it be sure to show me your love clicking the
below. And you can also subscribe to my new publications Shanghai Living and Lost Facts.You can connect with me via Twitter following me at @fernandlicon.
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
UK diplomat in China: Huge 'relief' when woman he rescued resumed breathing
Stephen Ellison, British consul-general in Chongqing, is seen rescuing a drowning student in Chongqing on Nov 14, 2020, in this video screengrab. (Image: Reuters TV/Jiang Lang via British consulate in Chongqing)
18 Nov 2020 05:22PM
Bookmark
BEIJING: A British diplomat hailed as a hero for rescuing a drowning student in southwest China over the weekend said he felt a deep sense of relief when he saw that the woman had resumed breathing and would be all right.
Stephen Ellison, Britain's consul general in Chongqing, had been at a nearby scenic spot last Saturday (Nov 14) when suddenly "there was a big commotion" after a female student accidentally fell into the river, he told Reuters during a video call on Wednesday.
Ellison, 61, who assumed his post in Chongqing in October, has been widely praised on Chinese social media, where dramatic videos of the rescue have become a top-trending item.
"It was pretty clear quite quickly that she was in trouble. She couldn't swim and she was submerged when she came up and she was floating on the surface of the water," he said.
British diplomat Consul General Stephen Ellison jumped into a river in Chongqing to rescue a woman who had fallen in. (Screengrabs: Twitter/ukinchina)
Seeing that she "was going to lose her life", the former civil engineer said some lifeguard training 50 years ago in Malta "clicked in".
"I whipped my shoes off and jumped in," he said.
"I got to her quite quickly and turned her over. But she wasn't breathing and she was unconscious so I really did fear the worst for a few moments actually," Ellison added.
People on the riverbank threw Ellison a lifebuoy and dragged the two to safety.
READ: China praises British diplomat for saving drowning woman
But for about half a minute, as they were approaching the shore, the woman still did not breathe.
"When she started breathing again it was just a really, really deep sense of relief," Ellison said.
After he was sure the woman would recover, Ellison was taken in by the villagers "and looked after very well", he said.
They washed and dried his clothes and gave him coffee before he was reunited with the woman he saved.
"She came and we met which was very sweet," he said. "She was clearly a little shocked but she was in good shape."
The woman, who is 24 and has not been publicly identified, has invited Ellison to a meal to express her thanks, which said he would be "delighted" to join.
"It's a great story, and if people take some pleasure from that, then great," Ellison said, declining to be drawn on whether his actions could improve strained relations between China and Britain.
"I don’t think it matters whether one is a diplomat, civil engineer, a student or whatever, that when things like this happen, then there’s a human reaction which is quite heartening isn’t it? That we feel that we can help, and that’s the way it should be," he said.
Source: Reuters/zl
Stephen Ellison, British consul-general in Chongqing, is seen rescuing a drowning student in Chongqing on Nov 14, 2020, in this video screengrab. (Image: Reuters TV/Jiang Lang via British consulate in Chongqing)
18 Nov 2020 05:22PM
Bookmark
BEIJING: A British diplomat hailed as a hero for rescuing a drowning student in southwest China over the weekend said he felt a deep sense of relief when he saw that the woman had resumed breathing and would be all right.
Stephen Ellison, Britain's consul general in Chongqing, had been at a nearby scenic spot last Saturday (Nov 14) when suddenly "there was a big commotion" after a female student accidentally fell into the river, he told Reuters during a video call on Wednesday.
Ellison, 61, who assumed his post in Chongqing in October, has been widely praised on Chinese social media, where dramatic videos of the rescue have become a top-trending item.
"It was pretty clear quite quickly that she was in trouble. She couldn't swim and she was submerged when she came up and she was floating on the surface of the water," he said.
British diplomat Consul General Stephen Ellison jumped into a river in Chongqing to rescue a woman who had fallen in. (Screengrabs: Twitter/ukinchina)
Seeing that she "was going to lose her life", the former civil engineer said some lifeguard training 50 years ago in Malta "clicked in".
"I whipped my shoes off and jumped in," he said.
"I got to her quite quickly and turned her over. But she wasn't breathing and she was unconscious so I really did fear the worst for a few moments actually," Ellison added.
People on the riverbank threw Ellison a lifebuoy and dragged the two to safety.
READ: China praises British diplomat for saving drowning woman
But for about half a minute, as they were approaching the shore, the woman still did not breathe.
"When she started breathing again it was just a really, really deep sense of relief," Ellison said.
After he was sure the woman would recover, Ellison was taken in by the villagers "and looked after very well", he said.
They washed and dried his clothes and gave him coffee before he was reunited with the woman he saved.
"She came and we met which was very sweet," he said. "She was clearly a little shocked but she was in good shape."
The woman, who is 24 and has not been publicly identified, has invited Ellison to a meal to express her thanks, which said he would be "delighted" to join.
"It's a great story, and if people take some pleasure from that, then great," Ellison said, declining to be drawn on whether his actions could improve strained relations between China and Britain.
"I don’t think it matters whether one is a diplomat, civil engineer, a student or whatever, that when things like this happen, then there’s a human reaction which is quite heartening isn’t it? That we feel that we can help, and that’s the way it should be," he said.
Source: Reuters/zl
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2008
- Messages
- 80,511
- Points
- 113
Just a meals? Come on! Chinese girls normally give much much more To show their appreciation!
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2018
- Messages
- 30,091
- Points
- 113
Dont worry,,,there will a part 2 as AMDK
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2020
- Messages
- 1,019
- Points
- 113
Similar threads
