That is a red herring. Can you verify statistically that these occurrences are more frequent in China than in the US? How about versus primarily Chinese neighborhoods in the US, or in Taiwan? Multiple anecdotes =/= statistics.
Furthermore, what I meant about wealth is that Chinese culture, from it’s inception thousands of years ago, has been about family first, not charity to society at large. This has created a culture in which charity to strangers is foreign. The idea that an average Chinese person might have enough wealth to be charitable was not even a remote possibility until the late 20th century. Historically, even if you were wealthy, you were a member of a very small minority. Furthermore, even nowadays many people live in rural or poor areas where charity is still a foreign concept.
I disagree. I know many upper-middle class Chinese who would never consider sending their parents into nursing homes. You’re purely considering the economic aspect of the situation while completely discounting cultural differences. Maybe in big cities, you feel like you’re culturally in the west, so you believe that western influences can transform China. I lived in Taiwan for around 8 years, and despite Taiwanese economic success in the past, the vast majority of people I spoke to never considered nursing homes for their parents. Even people unable to fit their parents in their apartments would rather buy their parents another apartment nearby instead of sending them away to be cared for by strangers.
I absolutely agree. In Taiwan, it’s sort of a stereotype that mainlanders are rude and have no concept of personal space (realize that we think this in one of the most crowded places in the world!). However, being rude is not the same as being morally wrong.
I’m not asking you to live up to some kind of Confucian ideal. Do what you want, and I won’t judge you. That’s the point I was trying to make, really. When we criticize a culture from outside it, we have to realize that people from that culture are oftentimes making equally valid criticisms of our culture.
I don’t suppose Pol Pot’s family-atomizing version of Communism ever could have flown in China? (I recall a scene from The Killing Fields – in a re-education class, a stick-figure family holding hands is drawn on the blackboard, and a little girl, having learned her lessons, walks up and draws a line cutting the child off from the parents, to the teacher’s approval. IOW, State is all, Family is nothing.)
Then again, were the pre-Khmer-Rouge Cambodians any less family-oriented than the Chinese?
A lot of that sort of stuff happened in the Cultural Revolution; children informing on and denouncing their parents; the Red Guards turning on their parents and teachers, stuff like that
If it took Communism to stop foot-binding, then you should find evidence of women in their late 60’s who have bound feet. I think if you Google for recent articles on footbound women today, like this, you’ll find that virtually all are, in 2015, over 75 years of age.
That scene in The Killing Fields is actually contrived. Roland Joffe says as much in the commentary track. That sort of thing was in the Khmer Rouge’s messaging, but that particular method of pedagogy was made up for the film.
Sure, but I learned in a university course on women in Asia that Mao’s troops went around un-binding women’s feet wherever they (the Maoists) went.
Are you being facetious? This is not in any way a valid rebuttal to the argument I made. In fact, it’s yet another red herring. I’ll remake the argument here: Can you provide a cite that Chinese people are more likely to stand by instead of helping strangers in need?
Regardless of whether or not Taiwan is politically part of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is very obviously a product of historical Chinese culture, a culture that remains intact in modern day China. In recent history, Taiwan has experienced parallel cultural developments with China, and due to earlier cultural exchange with the US, might foreshadow cultural developments in China. You would have to be insane to think there is no relevance.
The statements I gave earlier about people in Taiwan have been fully reflected in my experiences and discussions with people from the mainland.
It appears that you have conflated your identity and self-worth with your life and experience in China. I’m sorry that my contrary viewpoint is cramping your style.
At least since the Dutch, in 1662, surrendered Formosa to half-Chinese, half-Japanese, Koxinga, whether Taiwan was “very obviously a product of historical Chinese culture” has been an open question.
Re caring about people who appear to be hurt, my impression is that Taiwanese beggars are more likely to appear to be in pain than those where I live (Philadelphia* USA). Commonly seeing beggars who appear to be in pain could affect how quickly people help. However, just as you point out in the case of China, we don’t have statistics to show this.
From what I’ve read, beggary was unknown in Taiwan before the KMT/Chinese invasion of the late 1940’s. That invasion certainly brought in Chinese influences, of which beggary is one. But looking at Taiwan to understand Chinese culture won’t get us far.
However, I do agree with your skepticism about some of simple homer’s broader generalizations.
Lee Kuan Yew used to talk about Asian values, which supposedly covered not just China and Taiwan, but also other countries with only a small ethnically Chinese minority. At that point, the cultural values are so broad as to apply to almost any country that is middle income, or was middle income until recently, and lacks a mature democracy.
And beggars are more common in Philadelphia than Taiwan.
Lee Kuan Yew has just passed away (March 23 2015), and he certainly made an interesting contrast to ideas quoted by the OP. Founding father of Singapore, Anglo/Chinese, he was from the begining a passionate reformer trying to eliminate “the terrible poverty, the prevalence of disease, the anarchy and corruption in politics”, and was notable successful in doing so.
I don’t necessarily agree with your views on Chinese culture in Taiwan. Aboriginal Taiwanese are an extremely small minority group in Taiwan. Han Chinese make up over 95% of the population. My own grandparents were Han Chinese in Taiwan pre-KMT and their cultural and social views are in line with those I’ve observed among both Taiwanese and Chinese in general, from the mainland, in the US, etc.
WRT to deep rooted cultural aspects like Confucianism and family roles, the average modern Taiwanese is very similar to Chinese from all around the world. Of course, the cultural nuances regarding the impact of communism are not reflected so much in Taiwan. However, the majority population here still shares the same (cliched) 2000 years of history with Chinese.
"When a 26-year-old woman in Beijing leaned a little too hard against a roadside barrier and got her neck stuck between two of the railings, Chinese bystanders did what they’re increasingly notorious for doing: nothing. Security camera footage showed over a dozen people gawking and taking photos of the woman, who stood helpless on the side of a busy Beijing street in broad daylight for 30 full minutes before anyone tried to help. Finally, someone called the police, who pulled her out and rushed her to the hospital, where she was pronounced brain dead on Thursday.
The incident is another high-profile case in China of bystanders failing to help someone in need. When an elderly woman fell on her back in Shanghai last year, plenty of people gathered around to gawk and take photos, but none answered her pleas for help. When a Western woman arrived, chastised the crowd and helped the woman up, the incident became a brief point of national reflection: why, many Chinese asked, were their countrymen so callous to fellow citizens in need? As the China-focused news site Ministry of Tofu documents, this week’s Beijing incident is resurfacing the same internal debate and national soul-searching.
China was shocked into confronting its bystander problem in 2011, with the horrific story of a two-year-old girl in Foshan who was struck by a van. The impact didn’t kill her, but it did knock her down. As she lay helpless in the road, traffic cameras captured a procession of 18 people who walked or biked past her and did nothing. One man, in a scene that played out countless times in Chinese media as the country tried to understand what had happened, actually went out of his way to walk around the injured girl. Eventually, a second car hit and killed her.
“Every foreigner in China has heard the cliche about how people there are conditioned to steer clear of the complications of others’ misfortunes, and so will not stop to help someone who is hurt or troubled in a public place,” The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote after the 2011 Foshan incident.
China’s bystander problem is pervasive but complex enough that everyone has a theory for it. Perhaps the most popular is shao guan xian shi, an aphorism that roughly translates as “mind your own business,” which deters both interfering and helping others. Lijia Zhang explained in a much-circulated Guardian piece (hat tip again to Fallows):
The fundamental problem, in my view, lies in one word that describes a state of mind: shaoguanxianshi, meaning don’t get involved if it’s not your business. In our culture, there’s a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi, family and friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially if such kindness may potentially damage your interest.
This theory is convincing and generally accepted, particularly by Westerners who focus on China. What’s less agreed upon is why Chinese parents would teach their children to not interfere. Nods to Confucianism, the conservative social code that has been a part of Chinese society for centuries, are certainly common, although Japan and Korea are similarly Confucian but lack this notorious bystander problem.
Perhaps more compelling is China’s deep, and often undiscussed-in-China, history of intense resource competition. The country has undergone intervals of famine and political turmoil for centuries, most recently with the Great Leap Forward that saw tens of millions of Chinese starve to death in the late 1950s and then the Cultural Revolution, from 1967 to 1977, which turned family members against one another.
The idea that fellow citizens are someone with whom you compete for survival, rather than someone on whom you count for support, might not be too far below the surface. Social scientists have long found that people tend to be less altruistic, and exhibit more anti-social behavior, when basic resources are scarce or when they see survival as more competitive.
Another theory you hear commonly is that official state ideology since the 1949 communist revolution has sought to engineer Chinese society in ways that are not conducive to good Samaritans. Mao’s rule emphasized absolute loyalty to the Communist Party, even at the cost of turning against fellow citizens. Since 1992, when the country began its economic transformation, the state has urged economic success above all else, engendering a kind of hyper-capitalistic competitiveness.
The least compelling explanation for China’s bystander problem, but one that is often employed within China itself, is the idea that you shouldn’t help people because they might sue you. This argument typically hinges on the 2006 case of a Nanjing man named Peng Yu. Peng, As the story is widely told, Peng, helped an elderly woman who had been hit by a bus. The woman sued him and Peng was ordered to pay a large portion of her medical bills. The lesson is shao guan xian shi: by sticking his nose in things, Peng got exploited by a greedy old woman. You hear this story told over and over on Chinese social media every time a group of bystanders ignores someone in need, as with the Beijing woman this week. What they rarely mention is that Peng was forced to pay the woman’s medical bills because police believe he had pushed her in front of the bus in the first place.
Some in China defend against the issue by pointing to Kitty Genovese, a New York City woman who was stabbed to death in 1964 as dozens of onlookers watched from their nearby apartments but did nothing. Diffusion of responsibility is a universal problem, they argue, and not particular to China. But the Kitty Genovese story, it turns out, is probably apocryphal. Subsequent investigations, including one by the New York Times in 2004, have largely debunked the story as more fiction than fact.
What happened in Beijing this week, or in other Chinese cities over so many other recent incidents, is not in dispute. But the really important question still hasn’t been answered: why?"
Not being facetious. I have not visited Taiwan yet, but I have visited Hong Kong several times, and it is very easy to see the differences in Hong Kong and Mainland China.
My many friends that have lived in both China and Taiwan have told me that the two countries are very different.
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have very different recent histories to Mainland China, and it is probably very easy to see the differences in those countries in just one visit.
The modern Taiwanese is very similar to about a billion rural poorly educated Chinese ?
The past 80 or so years had no effect on today’s Taiwanese and mainland Chinese ?
"Taiwan:GDP (PPP) 2014 estimate
Per capita $43,599[9] (17th)
China: GDP (PPP) 2013 estimate
Per capita $11,868[12] (89th)"
Taiwan at 17th in the world versus China at 89th in the world ?