Why people won’t normally help you in an accident in China?

April 21 2018

Why people won’t normally help you in an accident in China?

One of my biggest cultural shocks in China was watching someone having an accident, but not being able to help them.

While I love China so far and Chinese people have been really nice to me, most of the time, there are some cultural shocks that are not easy to ignore. Helping others is one of them.

Three weeks ago I went to a soccer match between Shanghai SIPG and FC Seoul. After the game the traffic around the area was quite heavy. I was waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green when a couple in their electric scooter went through a red light, an old lady hit them and the three of them fell to the ground. The couple got up, yelled something to the old lady and then just got on the scooter and left. The old lady stayed there for some minutes while people passing by didn’t even try to help her.

This may be a weird situation for a foreigner who hasn’t been in China before, but it’s a normal thing to see here. When an accident occurs, people would not try to help others and would try to avoid any contact with the people involved in it.

While individualism in China is a big thing, this situation is more related to the fear of being accused as the responsible of the accident, even when you just tried to help.

The most popular case happened in the city of Nanjing, a city located at the west of Shanghai. The year was 2006 when Xu Shoulan, an old lady trying to get out of a bus, fell and broke her femur. Peng Yu, was passing by and helped her taking her to the hospital and giving her ¥200 (~30 USD) to pay for her treatment. After the first diagnosis Xu needed a femur replacement surgery, but she refused to pay it by herself so she demanded Peng to pay for it, as he was the responsible of the accident according to her. She sued him and after six months she won and Peng needed to cover all the medical expenses of the old lady. The court stated that “no one would, in good conscience, help someone unless they felt guilty”.

While this incident wasn’t the first, it was very popular and it showed one of the non written rules of China. If you help someone is because you feel guilty of what happened, so in some way you were or are involved in the accident or incident.

After the incident more cases like this appeared, usually with old people involved and suing their helpers because “if you weren’t responsible, why would you stopped to help me”. So people just stopped helping each other.

There were a couple of extreme cases where Chinese people refusing to help led to the dead of the person in need. Such is the case of Wang Yue, a two year old girl who was wandering alone in a narrow alley, because her mother was busy doing the laundry. She was ran over by two cars, and 18 people who passed around the area didn’t even look at her. Later a public anonymous survey revealed that 71% thought that the people who passed by didn’t stop to help her because they were afraid of getting into trouble.

That’s not the only case in 2011 an 88 year old Chinese man fell in the street and broke his nose, while people passed him by no one helped him and he died suffocating in his own blood. After some anonymous poll the result was the same, the people didn’t blame those who didn’t help, because the recent cases show that if you try to help someone you can get into trouble.

Other cases were solved thanks to the constant vigilance in China. In 2013 Wang Lan, a Chinese woman from the Liaoning province, was getting off the bus when she saw an old lady who fell because someone pushed her. Wang helped the old lady, called her family and then accompanied them to the hospital. She even paid the ¥200 for the medicine expenses of the old lady. After the accident she received a call where the lady was suing her because, in her words “When I was getting off the bus, she was the one closest to me” and “If it wasn’t you who bumped into me, why would you have helped take me to the hospital?”. The amount was ¥40,000 (~5,800 USD).

Lan’s lawyer used the public transport cameras to show that Wang wasn’t the one responsible of the accident, and so she won the case, but still the experience hit Lang’s good faith on helping others. This kind of cases are the ones that make Chinese people more indifferent to accident. It’s just a way to protect themselves.

While in recent years there have been some programs made by the government to improve this situation the general rule is not to help, why would you get in trouble for helping someone you don’t know.

From anecdotes and personal experiences this situation is even harder for foreigners in China, who most of the time would find themselves guilty of situations that they didn’t start like fights or discussions with local people. The rule of thumb is that if a foreigner is involved in a trouble, it would be his fault.

So even when it’s hard to just pass by when someone is in need, the experience and cases just prove that maybe China is not the place to do it yet.

This is one of the sad parts of the Chinese culture, which is very unfortunate in some way because my experience with some of them has been great and I can tell that they’re good hearted people, but some situations have pushed them to act in this way.