Footage from a seven-minute video, in which a toddler in Foshan, a city in southern China, was hit twice by vehicles and ignored by 18 people walking by while she lay in her own blood, has stirred up fierce debate over China's moral crisis.
The public is shocked by the cold-heartedness of the 18 people who did nothing to help the girl. However, many sigh that they themselves might have been the 19th detached witness had they been there.
Cracks can be seen in the moral framework of Chinese society. According to a latest survey by the Global Times website, 88 percent of the respondents said they would have helped save the two-year old girl. It is a pity the survey ratio did not achieve a non-hesitant 100 percent.
The other 12 percent (over 990 netizens) said they would have ignored the girl. Such people live among us, and in everyday life we do not despise them for such ideas. This is why at the accident scene in Foshan, this online ratio was completely overturned – 18 left the girl in a coma, and finally one elderly garbage collector called for help.
It is not that all of China lives in a state of brutal detachment within society. Most Chinese believe bad people are still the minority here, and if an old person falls down, there is still a greater chance he or she will be saved, rather than neglected.
A society wholly dominated by the laws of the jungle couldn't achieve great growth and prosperity. Without basic moral support, China couldn't possibly make the social progress it has made in recent years.
However, the Foshan tragedy does manifest that type of apathy, and it lurks and lingers in Chinese society, and may stifle a social sense of morality in certain circumstances. The detachment of the 18 people who passed by the girl, and the escape of the two drivers, have passed a moral bottom line. Nevertheless, this is a moral decay that exists within the nation, and it measures the lowest level of China's social morality.
Many are asking: What's wrong with China? We can find plenty of reasons to explain the tragedy in Foshan. We can criticize flaws in our laws, lash out at one or two legal precedents in which those who extended a helping hand were asked to compensate, and even blame the government for low efficiency in guiding social morality. However, it is the entire social environment, not those single reasons, which led to the apathy of the 18 people who decided not to help the girl.
Selfishness is unscrupulously booming in China. Normally it is restrained in human civilization. But in recent years, it has been highly tolerated even respected by some Chinese, and even seen as an ideological tool to break the traditional values of collectivism. It is not that selfishness has occupied the whole nation, but selfishness is devastating enough to shake the bottom lines of morality.
Walking out of a moral predicament calls for assistance by laws and politics. However, sticking to the bottom line, which shouldn't change with the times or circumstances, still relies on an individual sense of justice and responsibility. Let's join hands to resist the infinite expansion of selfishness, and the advocacy around it.