A reader speculates:
Rather than look at the sympathy or lack thereof of the Chinese, we might look at their sense of personal responsibility. They live in an authoritarian state that discourages individualism and is deeply scared of people feeling that they are in charge of their own lives. I could see how this sense of powerlessness might lead a person to instinctively believe that someone else is taking care of the problem, and the best thing for them to do is to let keep their head down. Basically, I suspect that it wasn't callousness so much as the deeply bred assumption that the ever-present Parent is handling the problem and that they shouldn't interfere since that would indicate disapproval of how the Parent is handling the problem.
Another writes:
Perhaps it's Chinese laws that discourage Good Samaritans from helping someone in distress – have a read. I think it would be wise to explore possibilities like this before painting an entire culture as "heartless". And in response to the writer who said that we "in the West" still "live in Christendom", let me remind him of the murder of Kitty Genovese, who was killed in Queens within hearing of all her neighbors, none of whom stepped outside to help.
Another delves deeper:
I have had a significantly different take on the incident, as I just finished reading The Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam. He devotes an entire chapter of the book to the Bystander Effect and human decision-making.
I'm neither a psychologist nor a scientist, but my basic takeaway from the book as to this effect is that it is part of the deep wiring in our brains, wiring that we never even notice at a conscious level. And it stems from (or at least can be explained as stemming from) our evolutionary tendency to make decisions socially. We like to think that we are highly-independent creatures and that we make our decisions based exclusively on our individual beliefs and motivations, but the science doesn't really support our beliefs. Vedantam illustrates this effect by describing several events and experiments, including:
– a horrifying beating on a Detroit bridge in 1995 (here's a link to a typical article about it, that, just as in the incident in Foshan, makes moral judgments about the passers-by),
– the amazing story of how almost everyone on one floor got out of the second tower before it came down on 9/11, when one floor above, no one got out, despite working for the same company, doing the same kind of work, etc.,
– a psych experiment done on elevators where a hired actor "accidentally" drops a jar of pencils or a bag filled with pennies, and how it turns out that the greater the number of people on the elevator correlates with a decreasing likelihood that even one person will stoop to help pick up the scattered items.
In other words, despite our suppositions about ourselves and our decency and our independence of action, we are more like lemmings then we like to admit. (And, of course, I have to make the caveat that we've unfairly stereotyped lemmings – they don't actually all follow one another off cliffs as has been so thoroughly ingrained in our pop culture belief systems).
The first article I read on the incident in Foshan tossed out a number of theories as to why the passers-by could be so heartless as to ignore the child – reasons ranging from some sort of societal malaise, to the perverse legal incentives of the traffic and tort laws in China, to blaming modernization, and the government of China. I've also read explanations that have blamed increasing urbanization in China (people live close together but remain strangers, unlike when they lived in villages). I'm pretty sure I've also seen atheism blamed, and several other explanations put forth in various articles. I think that Mr. Vedantam's book offers a more plausible, less moralistic explanation of how people could walk past that poor child.
Another:
People, at their core, are the same. Here is an article about Canadians walking past a dying man in the streets of Toronto. He was stabbed after coming to the rescue of a woman who was threatened with a knife. Shouldn't you be having the debate, "How Heartless Are People?"
Update from a reader:
That reader who sent the link to the Canadians walking past a dying man got it wrong. The story was from a Canadian paper, sure, but the incident took place in Queens, N.Y. Though to be "fair," the article does mention an incident in British Columbia where bystanders ignored a gang-rape in progress, so Canadians are not off the hook entirely.
Another:
You don’t have to be a Christian to be a Good Samaritan. Conger's dichotomous statement notes that a nonbeliever (the Samaritan) came to someone’s rescue before the priest and Levite. Even dogs try to help people in dangerous situations.
The Dish 