Stories concerning the apparent lack of any moral fibre among the Chinese have become increasingly common in the last few years, not least because they spread like wildlife on the country’s microblogging platforms, where they garner endless comments and retweets. Tania Branigan wrote in The Guardian about a number of tragic cases of child abuse, and, most recently, ex-pat sex offenders have be caught in foreign-run schools and English training centers who administrators obviously are more focused on the profits they turn than the characters of the people they employ.
As has been remarked before, it’s not so much the frequency of these kinds of stories of abuse and mistreatment, but the amplitude. To foreign observers, it seems incredulous that a child sex offender on the run from Scotland Yard could ever be employed in a French school, and the idea of a father so tired of his daughter’s voice could sew up the child’s mouth sounds like something cut out of a low budget schlock horror.
The fear of litigation forms the basis of the logic behind the reluctance of members of the public to help others in need. People who have helped, or in the recent case of a couple of boys who failed to act to save two girls from drowning and were fined 50,000rmb each, people who don’t help get sued equally. The lack of moral decency extends to those who help themselves, especially if it involves an easy way of making a lot of money.
While true that people’s distrust of others and institutions was eroded during the harshest years of Mao’s rule, scandals involving charitable organizations have done little to bolster confidence that money donated in good faith will actually end up with the people who need it, creating a downward spiral of mocking cynicism. The last sixty-odd years may have created unprecedented wealth for people in China, but it hasn’t done anything to inspire it’s citizens to stick their necks out.
Nearly a year on after Yue Yue’s death, and China’s first Good Samaritan law, snappily entitled the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Good Samaritans' Right Protection Regulation, comes into effect in the south of China. Initially effective only in the south of China, there are plans to roll the law out across the country in a desperate bid to make people that little bit more civilized. Only in China, do good manners have to be legislated. Typical of these new breed of laws aimed at leveling the playing field for the rich and poor alike, the law makes a big thing about compensation. In order to encourage people to help strangers, the law explicitly says that there will be no repercussions if the efforts to help are unsuccessful, and if someone is accused of causing the accident, there’s the opportunity to sue and claim compensation.
The good news is that, especially among the richer, younger classes, philanthropy and charitable works are actually on the increase. It’s not so much following in the footsteps of Lei Fang, but it does represent the level of financial comfort that the younger generation now find themselves. It’s the very gap between the rich and the poor that has created an “us and them” situation, the anonymous migrant workers don’t rub shoulders in Starbucks with the recent Harvard graduates returning to the Motherland. The graduates are a sign of a changing attitude towards money - as the pursuit of economic growth becomes a secondary concern, so might the reluctance of Chinese to offer a helping hand - especially when there’s no security cameras watching them.
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