Sue me if you dare

Public anger at the Chinese regime’s elite class erupted last month after this deadly hit-and-run accident at Hebei University in northern China. The driver is the son of a high-ranking police officer. He drove off after running down two students. When crowds stopped his car, he reportedly shouted “Sue me if you dare, my father is Li Gang.”


In the evening on October 16, 2010, due to drunk driving and speeding, a black Volkswagen Magotan hit 2 female student pedestrians wearing roller shoes in front of a supermarket at Hebei University. The incident caused one death and one injured. After the incident, like nothing had happened, the driver continued to drive his girlfriend to school. He was then later stopped by number of students and school security guards on his way back. Surprisingly, the young man showed little remorse and fear, he shouted, “Go ahead, sue me if you dare, my dad is Li Gang”. The report of this incident immediately caused uproar in China’s online community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Gang_incident

Near Wenzhou's No.14 Middle School on West Jiangbin Road (江滨西路) two nights ago at around 10pm, 19-year-old Ma Wenzong (马文总) assaulted the 18-month-old daughter of a shopkeeper during an altercation involving his Mercedes Benz GL450 SUV. While a bystander tried to block the path of the vehicle, Ma shouted out "My dad is the mayor!" (我爸是市长!), enraging the assembled onlookers in what looks to be the second Rich Brat Who Can't Drive Incident in one week.
The incident reportedly began when Ma's Mercedes SUV crushed the storefront signage of shopkeeper Liu Xiuying (刘秀英). After the two exchanged words, Ma rushed into Liu's store, and smashed a landline phone that sat atop a counter on the ground, before then using the store's calculator to repeatedly smack the head of Liu's 18-month-old daughter until blood was drawn.

At this point, Ma panicked and tried to escape in his SUV, but was blocked by bystander Wu Xiaodan (吴哓丹), who demanded that Ma "explain himself". Ma responded by attempting to drive away, and caught Wu's thigh underneath a wheel. Witnesses report that the SUV then reversed over Wu's thigh after rolling over it the first time.

10 bystanders then came out and surrounded the vehicle, whereupon he shouted the five characters that he'll forever be known for. Police eventually arrived, only to leave promptly after declaring both Ma and his girlfriend, who was in the vehicle during the entire incident, were not driving drunk.

The apparent failure to administer justice enraged the gathered onlookers, who at this point coalesced into a mob of a hundred or so people that surrounded Ma and demanded that he undergo further blood tests to determine whether he'd been drunk. Extra police were required to disperse the crowd, who were eventually appeased after authorities arrived four and a half hours after calls for a blood test were first made. Ma was then whisked away to a local police station, and is currently under detention in Wenzhou's Lucheng district (鹿城区).

Wu Xiaodan suffered multiple fractures in his leg after being run over by Ma's Mercedes, and Liu's Xiuying's daughter looks to be in stable condition, judging by photographs taken at scene following the incident.

Meanwhile, it was revealed later that Ma is merely the son of a local businessman, rather than Zhao Yide (赵一德), the Mayor of Wenzhou.

It doesn't come as much of surprise that a 19-year-old was cruising around with a GL450, which has a modest sticker price that hovers in the neighborhood of 1.5 million RMB ($235,000 USD) for the 2011 model. Wenzhou and the rest of Zhejiang are known for having their fair share of wealthy types who splurge on cars, with an accident in 2009 involving a 20-year-old Porsche driver highlighting the extent to which kids had it made in the wealthy coastal province.

We think it's a good thing that Ma doesn't lack for testicular fortitude, given his willingness to tell blatant lies and attack infant children. That sort of moxie should certainly serve him well when the cell door slams shuts in his face for the long haul.

October 13, 2011,Guangzhou, China.. A little girl, about 2 years old, was hit by a truck in a car accident. She was run over three or more times. Around  18 passer bys walked around the body without helping or calling for help. Finally a women took the body out of the road and called the mother.  The incident is sparking outrage in China and prompting soul-searching over why people didn’t help the child.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/an-injured-toddler-is-ignored-and-chinese-ask-why/2011/10/19/gIQAxhnpxL_story.html?tid=sm_btn_twitter



BEIJIING — Several dramatic recent incidents — including one involving a 2-year-old girl run over in the road while more than a dozen bystanders ignored her plight — have opened a searing debate in China over whether, in the race to get rich, the country might have lost its moral bearings.

The little girl, Yueyue, who was critically injured and remains in a coma, was run over last Thursday by two vehicles as a gruesome video recording captured 18 people walking or driving by who did not intervene. What most shocked many was that this was just the latest example of Chinese passersby who declined to help others in distress.

At the West Lake UNESCO World Heritage Site in eastern Zhejiang province last week, an unidentified woman, reportedly an American tourist, jumped into the water to rescue a woman who was drowning, possibly attempting suicide. Internet chat sites immediately lighted up with questions about why a foreigner intervened, while no Chinese would.

The reason most often given is that recently in China, bystanders who did intervene to help others have found themselves accused of wrongdoing. In August, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, a bus driver named Yin Hongbing stopped to help an elderly woman who had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. But until he was vindicated by surveillance videos, Yin was the one accused of hitting the woman.

There have also been several cases of passersby stopping to help elderly people who had fallen, or were pushed, and who then were sued by the victims or were arrested. The thinking here is: They must have been responsible or they would not have stopped to help.

It did not help matters that the Health Ministry in September issued new “Good Samaritan” guidelines that essentially warn passersby not to rush to help elderly people on the ground, but to first ascertain whether they are conscious and then wait for trained medical personnel to arrive.

One Internet user, in a comment posted after the West Lake incident, wrote: “That tourist was too impulsive. She didn’t know that in China, kind people who save others are often accused of being the perpetrator. The next time you run into someone who was hit by a car, you need to be careful.”

But the case of the toddler lying in the street has ignited a debate about indifference to suffering and whether society itself has suffered some kind of a moral collapse.

“Cracks can be seen in the moral framework of Chinese society,” the Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper wrote in its lead editorial Wednesday. “Many are asking: What’s wrong with China?”

In response, many here — scholars in interviews and Internet users in chat rooms — have turned the blame on the government. They say that the breakdown began during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s and that in a system that does not respect individual rights and freedoms, people take their cue from the behavior of officials at the top.

“I think the biggest problem is the corruption of the government officials,” Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview. He used an old Chinese idiom: If the upper beam is not straight, the lower beams will go askew.

Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, said he saw the problem as an absence of religious ethics in what is largely an atheist society. Modern Chinese, he said, “don’t have beliefs, although China has indigenous religions like Taoism and Buddhism. . . . China is actually an atheist country, and Chinese people are never afraid of God’s punishment.”

Hu added: “The Chinese government has made economic development its central task, which means everything is money-centered. . . . Both the legal system and the moral system have been sacrificed to money­making.”

In the case of the toddler, the driver who first hit her said in a telephone interview with a Guangdong television station that he had been talking on his phone when the girl walked in front of his vehicle. He said he kept driving because if she were dead, it would only cost him 10,000 to 20,000 renminbi ($1,500 to $3,000), but if she were alive, he would have to pay hundreds of thousands of renminbi in medical bills.

Referring to the driver’s comments, one Internet user posting under the name Ximending Xiaodoujiang wrote, “If the compensation for a death were higher than the cost of medical care, these cases might not happen.”

But, the writer added, it was “unrealistic” to expect a change soon, because for Chinese today, “all they can think about is food and clothes.”

Researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.