South Korea seizes capsules containing powdered flesh of dead babies

[HiPointDem]

45. Reportedly it took 7 minutes until someone helped her (a rubbish collector). In that time 18

people passed.

Supposedly, that's an indictment of all Chinese people and Chinese culture generally.

I don't think so. Such cases don't mean anything unless they happen regularly.

I was threatened by a strange man in a public place. He said he was going to stab me. I screamed for help and ran from him. There were lots of people around. No one helped me, they just stared at me or laughed or turned away, and the guy got away.

Does that mean Americans are generally selfish and uncaring and american culture ditto? Why isn't my story in the newspaper so Chinese people could "Tsk tsk" about how Americans don't want to help people they don't know?

When stories like this appear in the media, they don't give a full picture of what happened and they are often there for *political* reasons. They also feed stereotypes.

Some incidental information:

Previously, there have been incidents in China, such as the Peng Yu incident in 2006,[9][10] where Good Samaritans who helped people injured in accidents were accused of having injured the victim themselves. Some commentators have explained that this may have caused people to fear getting in trouble for doing the right thing, thus failing to help.

The Communist Party Chief of the Guangdong province, Wang Yang, called the incident "a wake-up call for everybody."[4] The Sina Weibo website attracted more than 4.5 million posts on the incident within a few days, and launched a "stop apathy" campaign online.

In November 2011, the results of a poll by the China Youth Daily, the official Communist party newspaper for youth, showed that 80% of the young people surveyed said they had been following the case closely, and 88% of those polled thought that Wang died because of growing indifference (in China) towards other people.

A majority, 71%, also thought that the people who passed the child without helping were afraid of getting into trouble themselves. According to an article by Chen Weihua, deputy editor of the China Daily, China's most widely circulated English-language newspaper, "Various surveys in the past weeks have shown that the majority of the people polled believe our morals have suffered a major setback in the past decade."

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

What this tells me is that most chinese believed what happened was *wrong,* saw it as a *new* phenomenon, not something typical of chinese culture before 2000 or so.

There's also this:

While most attention was focused on the passers-by who failed to assist Wang, a British journalist interviewed other shopkeepers in the Foshan hardware market who were just metres away yet failed to respond. He found that the area where the incident occurred comprised mainly internal migrant families (the Wangs had migrated from Shandong seven years earlier). In the writer's view, there was little sense of community and little in common there....

Bystander effect
Kitty Genovese

etc.

what's so particularly *chinese* about it? nothing.