Hu Jun was convicted of involuntary homicide by the Nanhai District People’s Court in the city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, where the girl, named Wang Yue, was hit and crushed by Hu’s minibus and another vehicle on Oct. 13.

[…] An earlier statement by the court said Hu was driving in dim lighting conditions amid torrential rain without turning on the headlights of his vehicle. He thought he had hit something but failed to stop and check.

The court said it also issued a lenient sentence because Hu gave himself up to police and paid part of the victim’s medical expenses.

The case earned particular notoriety not because of the accident itself but because of the eighteen passers-by who did nothing to help the injured child. Their inaction revived discussion of China’s supposed moral decline, and of the problem of “Good Samaritans” being sued by the very people they were trying to help. The most prominent case was that of Peng Yu, a young Nanjinger who, after coming to the aid of a fallen elderly woman in 2006, was successfully sued for knocking her over in the first place. The judge’s reasoning, that Peng could have had no reason for helping her except a guilty conscience, sparked an outcry, but his conclusion and the woman’s claims later turned out to be correct.

See more on Wang Yue’s case at Shanghaiist.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Foshan, Good Samaritan, Guangdong, hit-and-run, moral crisis, traffic accidents, Yueyue
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We live in an age when dust blocks the sky. Politics is dirty, the economy is dirty, and even culture smells like it’s rotten. Our heart is supposed to be clear like the water in the autumn and the unending sky, but if we place it in the dust for a long time, then it can’t help but getting dirty and frangible. When we mail fragile items at the post station, the staff there will stamp the image of a red glass on the package to show that what’s inside is fragile. I hope everyone stamps a red glass on their heart too. It will remind us that this is a heart that needs sympathy and a heart that needs clarity. It is precious, but it is also fragile. We should take care of it every day and keep it free of dust. It should be as clear as the water in autumn, and as clean as the sky.

The essay echoes a widespread angst about moral decay:

[…] If you could quantify empathy, it might sadden you to discover that residents of Mainland China rank very low. In the famous Wang Yue incident [CDT's link], a two-year-old girl died in the middle of the road, and 18 people walked by without helping. These 18 people represent a greater number, a very unkind number of people that will yell at beggars, ignore victims of distant disasters, and even lack empathy for their own relatives. If people are beaten, they’ll just stand around and watch. If people are complaining, they’ll just coldly mock them. […]

A somewhat more optimistic view of the Chinese moral character appeared in Li Chengpeng’s recent reaction to the Beijing floods. From chinaSMACK’s translation:

Chinese people’s characters are ordinarily suppressed by a certain power. When a nation is only keen on purchasing cars for officials instead of building up public transportation, when the Ministry of Railways only cares for major construction projects instead of doing a better job on public service, people have to have low characters simply for self-protection. But the humanity is there, like a luminous pearl, normally ordinary and unremarkable like a rock, but in the key moment shining brightly. Everybody knows——that old man in the water clearing the clogged drains and sewers, those sanitation workers who stood in front of the open sewer manholes [to prevent others from falling in], those men carrying bottled water and bread who rushed into the rainy night to search for trapped people, those city residents who normally would be paranoid by by a crossed line at this moment bravely publicizing their own addresses and cell phone numbers to provide food, shelter, and a hot bath ….

See more about and by Murong Xuecun via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: floods, Li Chengpeng, moral crisis, morality, Murong Xuecun, social decay
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This curious but important tale begins on the morning of Nov. 20, 2006, when Xu Shuolan, a 65-year-old grandmother stepped off a bus in Nanjing, and fell to the ground. Just behind her was Peng Yu, a 26-year-old student. While others passed her by, Peng –- a self-described Good Samaritan — rushed to her aid, accompanied her to the hospital and even paid her modest bill.

In thanks, Xu Shuolin -– a woman of modest means –- sued Peng for roughly $7,000 in medical expenses she claimed were due to the fall, including broken bones. The judge, in turn, invented a new “everyday experience” standard in the law, suggesting that nobody pays a stranger’s medical expenses without a guilty conscience. And on that basis, he ruled against Peng Yu, turning the case into shorthand for the decline of Chinese morality ….

Or rather, it was until Jan. 16 — when, in what seems to be one of the great scoops in recent Chinese journalism, the state-owned news magazine Oriental Weekly revealed the content of some newly discovered and disclosed documents. According to the trove, Peng Yu not only confessed to knocking over that supposedly greedy granny in 2006, but he actively solicited the local news media and online forum moderators to promote him as a martyred Good Samaritan.

See also ‘In China, Don’t Dare Help the Elderly’ (featuring an earlier article by Minter), ‘Protect the Good Samaritan, or Punish the Bad?’ and ‘Toddler Declared “Brain Dead” in Guangdong Hit-and-Run Tragedy’, on CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: compensation, legal defense, moral crisis, moral vacuum, Nanjing
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“International hostile forces” use thought and culture “to Westernize and split” China, Hu stated in a speech publicized in January in the party magazine Seeking Truth.

At least China’s embattled youth can strike back at the West come May when Glorious Mission, a civilian version of the Chinese army’s first training simulation game, goes on sale, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. Co-developed by the People’s Liberation Army, the online, first-person shooter game allows players to destroy enemies that resemble U.S.forces.

Glorious Mission and other “serious games” supported by Chinese authorities form one front in Beijing’s multiheaded cultural offensive, launched last fall. There’s been fighting talk from Hu’s likely successor, Xi Jinping.

Here is some footage from the video game from NDTV:

The USA Today article goes on to mention longstanding censorship policies, and the recent limitations on entertainment programming in China. The article includes quotes by Chinese intellectuals hinting at possible policy contradictions between soft power campaigns and ones aimed at bolstering moral correctness:

Grabbing the world’s attention will remain a tough task unless the government relaxes its decades-long control of “cultural products,” cautions Yin Hong, a professor of film and television studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

“The restrictions on culture always make it hard for China to produce world-influencing literature and cinema,” writes China’s most popular blogger, novelist Han Han.

The Diplomat’s David Cohen has more to say about the self-defeating nature of China’s current “cultural” policy:

Paradoxically, the call for strengthening Chinese culture may mean pulling popular (and apolitical)  homegrown content off the air and out of the cinemas – there has been a recent spate of bans directed at popular Chinese TV, including dating shows and, most eccentrically, dramas that involve time travel.  Of course, this type of cultural censorship has a long history in China, including a previous ineffectual effort to force moviegoers to watch a martial arts epic about Confucius instead of Avatar.

Censorship is likely to cripple the international prong of cultural security – the effort to build a high-powered cultural industry.  China’s efforts, such as the recent “Flowers of War,” which starred Christian Bale in what was an effort to communicate the Chinese perspective on World War II to a foreign audience, are frequently overshadowed by negative stories. In this case, Bale was forcibly prevented from meeting a rights activist under informal house arrest.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cultural war, media control, moral crisis, soft power, video games
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The restricted programmes include talent, dating and game shows, as well as evening performance galas, talk shows and reality shows.

No more than nine such shows will be allowed to be aired on the 34 cable channels between 7.30pm and 10pm each day. Each television network will be limited to two such shows each week and to no more than 90 minutes of such shows between 7.30 and 10 on any given night ….

Each cable television channel must air at least two hours of news-related programming from 6pm to midnight every day, plus two independently-produced news programmes, each at least 30 minutes long, from 6pm to 11.30pm each day. Every channel should broadcast a programme on ideology and morality to promote traditional Chinese culture and “socialist core values”.

The measures are believed to be an attempt to remagnetise the nation’s drifting moral compass, but may simply drive bored younger viewers to seek out foreign programming online. From The Guardian:

Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, said he had heard of similar edicts being sent to film companies.”People were told by SARFT that they needed to do less entertainment content and improve the balance, with more wholesome content or content conveying messages endorsed by government organs,” said Natkin, who focuses on media and telecoms ….

“[Official concerns] are that left entirely to the market, there are no limits to the levels that programme producers will sink to as they try to attract new audiences and good ratings ….”

Bill Bishop, an independent internet analyst based in Beijing, said video-sharing sites hosting foreign reality shows may receive a boost in traffic, and suggested that authorities might seek to curb this. “If they are neutering traditional television, you have to wonder why they are not going to do something about online [access] – at the moment there’s all the stuff that doesn’t get broadcast,” he said.

China Real Time Report included some prominent netizens’ reactions to SARFT’s new restrictions:

Online reaction on China’s Internet was largely critical, both of the new rules and of an editorial in the People’s Daily official Communist newspaper that supported such a move. “Cultural reform has mutated into the Cultural Revolution,” said Wu Jiaxiang, political commentator and former visiting scholar at Harvard University, on his verified Sina Weibo microblogging account.

“Don’t take this lightly. The Cultural Revolution started with the criticism of ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,’” Zhao Chu, a military expert and newspaper columnist, wrote on his verified Weibo account, referring to a 1959 Peking Opera play about an upright Ming Dynasty official that was criticized by the Gang of Four in 1965 as a veiled lionization of one of Mao Zedong’s political rivals. “If we don’t resist this so-called cultural revolution and cultural construction, it could quickly turn into the most violent and cultureless of movements. Cultural and intellectual tyranny is the foundation of despotic violence.”

See more on SARFT’s rulings and the government’s recent emphasis on cultural development, on CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cultural consumption, ideological vacuum, media controls, moral crisis, moral vacuum, news media, SARFT, television
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Inside-Out China‘s author Xujun Eberlein has re-posted on an previous milk scandal comment:

The Chinese expression “quede” (缺德) , meaning “short of virtue,” used to be one of the most vicious insults in verbal arguments. Nowadays, the expression seems to have lost its admonishing power and has simply become a portrait of reality. Last year, a Chinese blogger cyber-named “David” attempted to analyze this. In his widely read article “Why have Chinese become ‘quede’ now?” he lists a few representative views on the Chinese moral sphere: all citizens worship money; no more baselines exist for minimal morality; today is the worst time of moral degeneration in China’s history; China should return to its traditional values.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis comments at China Brief on the moral valence of the recent tainted milk scandal, as well:

I find it hard to believe the Chinese executives at Sanlu, when faced with the request to recall their defective products deliberately set out to hospitalize or kill Chinese babies. Yet their actions, in not recalling product, and those also of the local government officials who failed to act, demonstrate a deep rooted inability to determine between right and wrong. They were amoral.

Earlier on in the article, Devonshire-Ellis accounts for this moral insufficiency in citing a lack of religious education:

[...]the deeper implication however is an essential lack of morality within Chinese society. With China being an atheist state, religion is strictly controlled. There is no religious education in Chinese schools, a situation completely at odds with most of the rest of the world. The impact of this has been to create a society largely amoral, ignorant of the differences between right and wrong.

Religious education notwithstanding, Eberlein also offers the contemporary Confucianist Jiang Qing‘s take:

To [Jiang Qing] the essential problem is the lack of state ideology and a corresponding political system. Since the Cultural Revolution led to the self-destruction of Communism, that once ideological monopoly has lost its past aureole, and common Chinese have been unable to find the ultimate meaning and value for their individual lives.

“The problem isn’t that people don’t follow moral standards; the problem is that there no longer exist moral standards,” says Jiang Qing. He attributes the loss of morality to five decades of atrophy under Communist political power, plus two decades of corrosion under the money and wealth brought by the Western market economy.

See also CDT guest blogger Josie Liu’s recent post.

© browland for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Confucian, moral crisis, morality, religion, tradition
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If I somehow managed to live with poor quality clothes, shoes and appliances, since it is simply the reality of the market, I was always scared of fake drugs and contaminated food. But never before was I so ashamed of China’s notorious fakes and counterfeits. This time, it was the melamine-tainted Sanlu baby formula that killed four babies and sickened over 10,000.

While watching photos of little babies lying in hospital with IVs stuck to their little heads, my heart hurt. I can’t help but ask: What is wrong with our people? What made them so obsessed with making a little more money that they even harmed our little babies?!

There is an old saying in Chinese: Even animals as cruel as tigers won’t hurt their own child. It is also common among wild animals to situate their young in the very center of the entire group to protect them from predators. Needless to say, babies are the most precious human beings. They are the future of every nation, every group of people. So how can someone ever try to make a profit at the cost of babies health, even life?

It is said that the melamine that harmed so many babies was likely added by people at the milk collection centers, where milk from dairy farms was sold to formula factories. It is appalling to realize that those people who actually put in the chemical may well know that the very milk they were poisoning would be used to make baby formula.

Aside from tightening regulations, removing high-profile officials, and arresting a bunch of bad guys, we as a nation should really ask ourselves: What went wrong? What makes us so ruthless in making money that we even hurt ill people, and now, babies? Just how deep we have fallen down the moral cliff? Can we ever climb back up?

There are some deeper and more severe problems in Chinese society way beyond sloppy market regulations, incompetent officials and corruption. When a nation starts to see its babies harmed on a large scale by its own adults, something is seriously wrong.

© Josie Liu for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: milk contamination, moral crisis, Sanlu
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CB: Do you think of the rise of Christianity mainly as a subset of a larger phenomenon, such as a turn toward spirituality more generally that has also seen an increase in the popularity of other imported and local religions? Or do you see it as something that is completely distinctive?

EO: The rise of Christianity in China is part of a broader spiritual awakening. People are seeking new sources of guidance everywhere, from mystical Taoist sects to B’hai temples. Among the measures of that, a survey by East China Normal University found that nearly a third of those polled described themselves religious. In particular, the rising middle class seems to be searching for a kind of moral reference as they confront new social and economic choices. One of the interesting things about Chinese Christians is that we don’t yet know what kind of social positions they will endorse: Will the mainstream of Christianity in China be a form of liberal Protestantism familiar in some American churches or will it be closer to the conservative brand that is thriving in the developing world?

See an video diary by Osnos, plus other pre-release materials related to the documentary, here.

© Zhaohua Li for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christianity, moral crisis, religion
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At the turn of the New Year, a woman’s name, “Hu Ziwei,” became a synonym for China’s widespread marital crisis.

Hu Ziwei’s husband, Zhang Bin, is a famous sports announcer. On Dec. 28, Zhang was hosting a press conference to announce the renaming of China’s Central TV “Sports Channel,” when Hu walked onto the stage, interrupting his speech. She took over Zhang’s microphone, and sobbed to the astounded audience, “I just learned two hours ago that Mr. Zhang Bin has kept an improper relationship with another woman.”

When Zhang and his staff tried to stop her, Hu struggled and kept saying, “The Olympics will be here next year, the whole world pays great attention to China, but without a proper value system, China is far from a great country.”

This short scene has since been broadcast on YouTube and viewed by over 400,000 people around the world, and the so-called “Hu Ziwei phenomenon” has made a big stir on the Chinese Internet. [Full Text]

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hu Ziwei, moral crisis
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