A devastating video of a Chinese infant left for dead on the street after being hit by two vans has gone viral:
A closed-circuit television video obtained by state media shows the toddler wandering along a narrow market street in the city of Foshan when she is struck by a van. As several people walk or cycle by, the child lies in a pool of blood and is then hit by another van. All told local media count 18 people passing by before a trash collector finally picks up the child and gives her to a woman identified as her mother. … China's version of Twitter, Sina Corp.'s Sina Weibo, has drawn 4.4 million comments and organized them under the hash tag "Please end the cold-heartedness."
The above report shows video from before and after the accidents but edits out the striking of the child. Austin Ramzy has more:
Recently China has seen prominent cases of bystanders ignoring injured people. In Wuhan last month an elderly man who had fallen in a market died after he suffocated from a nosebleed. While a large crowd had gathered, no one had offered to help, and he was only taken to the hospital by family members who arrived more than an hour later, according to the official China Daily. As my colleague Hannah Beech reported, one explanation is that many Chinese fear the liability they might incur, because Good Samaritans have sometimes seen the people they intend to help turn on them. In one famous 2007 case in Nanjing, a young man who helped a woman who had fallen while getting off a bus was later sued. The woman claimed that he was the one who pushed her, and a court ruled that he was partly responsible. Other explanations include the so-called "bystander effect," in which crowds make people less likely to help injured people. Still others discuss a decline of morality that has shadowed China's dramatic economic reforms.
The Dish 