[...]These tragedies have nothing to do with the system, there are evil people in the world, that’s all. Sooner or later, you’re bound to come into contact with the evil of humanity. My grandfather told me, before he passed, that not all people you see walking along the streets are human: some are demons wearing human clothes.

[...]I truly don’t think it has anything to do with the system. Although China has always had this or that problem with protecting women and children, this is the result of the level of development in the economy and society. I have also done some research and found that in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, a woman who was only 20 years old put her newborn infant in the refrigerator, where the baby died. The autopsy showed that the poor child was still alive when she was put in the fridge.

[...]It’s clear that such cruel murders of infants occur in China and abroad. They just do not believe in hell. The act of killing a baby is not related to the system or education. The “human evil” of the individual is the source of violent acts.[...]

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, crime, Li Chengpeng, murder, online public opinion, Yueyue
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The baby’s unintended abduction captivated China and led to one of the largest manhunts in recent memory. By 7:30 Monday morning, provincial radio had broadcast a notice asking listeners to watch out for the family’s gray Toyota RAV4 and the infant. The search lasted into the next day, with taxi drivers joining a police search that stretched into neighboring provinces.

“We night drivers have all come out, we’re calling each other, we were out with the day shift,” a taxi driver was quoted telling the provincial television station Monday night.

Other media outlets described citizens driving around Changchun with their breastfeeding wives to provide for the infant in case he was found.

On Tuesday morning, police reported, inspectors identified the stolen car in a residential parking lot 20 miles outside the city. The infant’s clothing was found nearby.

Soon the thief turned himself into police and admitted strangling Haobo. Chinese netizens have compared the case to a similar case in New York, in which the thief left the child unharmed and called the police to report his whereabouts. From the NPR blog:

In two different countries, two grey SUVs were stolen with babies still inside, while the parents popped into supermarkets. There’s an uncanny similarity between the two cases, even though one happened in Changchun in northeastern China, the other in the Bronx. But how the cases played out is very different.

In the American case, which happened last month, as The New York Post puts it, “The silver Jeep was found abandoned just over an hour later with the child unharmed — after the perp phoned in the car’s location to police.”

[...]

The grisly fate of 2-month-old Haobo has led to an outpouring of shock and grief online. “The difference between China and the U.S. is not just the crime rate,” commented a young writer named Sun Yuchen, who works for the outspoken Southern Weekly newspaper, “The fractured Chinese reality has made people lose their basic morality. We are becoming a nation with no bottom line, no humanity.”

The Washington Post blog has more on the reaction to the crime by netizens and residents of Changchun, where Baby Haobo was killed:

As thousands turned out for a candlelight vigil in Changchun, sorrow online turned to hand-wringing and even anger over the money-crazed values of China’s new society.

“How did the social security become this bad? How did man lose all his humanity?” posted one mother named Che Xiaoyan.

And the Guardian reports on the way story has been controlled by propaganda authorities, and used by commercial enterprises:

Other posts held a mirror up to the intense government control and crass commercialism that define life in China. Journalists leaked a circular from the Changchun propaganda department instructing local media on how to report on the crisis. “No frontpage coverage allowed,” it said. “There shall be no questioning of the police’s work.” Posts containing the instructions have since been deleted by internet censors.

A Buick dealership in a neighbouring province used a picture of the baby in a microblog post advertising a GPS system that would guarantee customers “peace of mind” in similar circumstances. The dealership was skewered by netizens – “go die” wrote one – and subsequently issued an apology.

Jalopnik.com has more about the Buick ad.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: children, crime, murder, online public opinion, Yueyue
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Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Lisa Cameron, another of the study’s authors, discussed the findings (PDF transcript) with Sarah Crespi on the Science magazine podcast.

Some have expressed reservations about the study, however. From Rebecca Morelle at the BBC:

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

And from Louise Watt at the Associated Press:

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

A recent survey of 51,100 people by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the idea that Chinese society lacks trust, according to Xinhua. Its authors, though, point to a wider range of contributing factors including migration.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Migration would not account for differences between the Australian study’s native Beijingers, but its role in loosening the traditional social fabric finds anecdotal support in the Wang Yue incident cited above by Xin Meng. In October 2011, The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore visited the Foshan marketplace where the accident took place:

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, demographics, Foshan, little emperor, migration, moral vacuum, one-child policy, population control, trust, trust crisis, Yueyue
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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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Yang’s Jewish problem generated less attention on the Chinese Web than the broader question of foreigners. It’s never difficult to find a nationalist on the Chinese Web, but the proportions surprised me this week. There is a heavy vote in support of the government’s announced hundred-day campaign to ferret out the foreigners who lack the right papers. “Whether it’s foreign or domestic, the trash should be cleaned out,” as one voice put it. “Foreigners have been treated too well for too long in China; time to get used to something new,” wrote another.

This, too, shall pass. The roots of nationalism in China are deep and raw, as I described in the magazine the last time this issue erupted. But, four years later, China continues to welcome foreigners most of the time with a quirky and endearing enthusiasm. As a snapshot of a moment, it needed to be noted. Don’t cancel your trip.

For Foreign Policy, CDT contributor Anne Henochowicz details China’s love-hate relationship with expats:

Just as foreigners are often cast as villains in China, they sometimes appear as heroes. A few days before “Aijan’s” video went viral, a Good Samaritan appeared. Weibo user @MovieFactory saw a young man buy McDonald’s fries to share with an old beggar woman in Nanjing, sitting and chatting with her. “This is the most love-filled story I’ve seen today,” MovieFactory glowed. “Re-tweeted” nearly 38,000 times, this “handsome American” was soon identified as Jason Loose of Los Angeles, a student at Nanjing University. Although Loose claims he didn’t do anything special, Chinese netizens see in him an altruism lacking in their own society.

Chinese netizens sometimes compare foreigners to their own aloof citizenry. The contrast was especially startling last October, when the country watched horrifying footage of a toddler run over twice in a Guangdong street and left ignored by passersby for seven minutes before someone came to her aid. The little girl, Yueyue, died after struggling in the hospital for a week. On the same day, Uruguayan expat Maria Fernanda jumped into West Lake in Hangzhou to save a suicidal Chinese woman from drowning.

Weibo user @LiTingBalinda noted that while Fernanda was rescuing the woman, “the Chinese just gathered and watched; and when they came out of the water and the woman’s life was in the balance, the Chinese people took out their cellphones to take pictures. What kind of sick society is this?”

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, CCTV, foreigners, Good Samaritan, immigration, racism, xenophobia, yang rui, Yueyue
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