The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples

Is there a “Good Samaritan” equivalent within the Chinese cultural ethos? Some would say no. For me and a lot of other foreigners in China, the apparent unapologetic absence of a Good Samaritan impulse — an alarming, flagrant disregard for other people — is one of the most shocking and appalling aspects of Chinese culture and society.

I wrote on it during our first year in China because it “thundered” me (我被它雷了), but never published it on the blog because I was trying to be careful about how we shared the negative side of our China experience. Showing up in someone’s country and immediately writing about their embarrassing social and cultural problems is bad form. Plus, I wanted to have better understanding of what was going on, read more, maybe discover the other side of the coin, and get some distance and perspective from the experience and the culture stress (by getting out of China) before sharing it with family and friends (and the internet) back home.

So I’m sharing it now, in three parts: Recognizing examples of the behaviour we’re talking about (Part 1), Understanding some of the underlying cultural “whys” (Part 2), and Deciding how to intentionally respond to this aspect of Chinese culture (Part 3).

Judging Other Cultures

We do judge other cultures whether we realize and admit it or not; it’s unavoidable for anyone with their brains at least half switched on, and it’s not a bad thing in and of itself. How, when, and why we judge are the areas where we often get into trouble. This isn’t about trying to make one culture look better than another or put down Chinese culture. Any of the aforementioned people-with-their-brains-at-least-half-switched-on ought to realize that Western societies have no shortage of glaring, embarrassing cultural issues. In fact, an intelligent Chinese critique of appalling aspects of Western cultures that they encountered while living in Canada would be fascinating to me, and valuable to my cross-cultural understanding.

When you enter a new cultural context, like if you’re a Canadian who moves to China or a Mainlander who’s moved to Canada, lots of stuff seems more or less annoying or offensive. That’s part of the cross-cultural experience. But understanding some of the reasons why people behave a certain way takes the edge off those feelings of superiority and condemnation, and we can maybe start sympathizing or empathizing or even start behaving that way ourselves. Occasionally you may still decide to personally reject or even morally condemn an aspect of a foreign culture after gaining some understanding of it, but at this point you’re not blindly judgmental.

For little things, like strangers getting a little ‘too personal’, it’s easier to reserve judgment at first and then learn not to be offended later on. But other things are so blazingly offensive that you’d rather curse the people out than attempt to understand and empathize. The behaviour we’re talking about in this series of posts is of the latter kind.

So with that overly-long intro out of the way, here are some real life examples of what the “absence of a Good Samaritan impulse” looks like in today’s China.

Is there a Good Samaritan in the house?

Example 1: Traffic fatality outside our language school
Why is it that, in China, when a guy is laying in the road bleeding from the head, the only people in the crowd who rush to help him are the foreigners?

The semester before we arrived, an American friend was with other Mandarin students and teachers leaving the school grounds on their way to a school group lunch when she heard tires squeal and a sickening *crunch*. They turned in time to see a man and his bicycle fly through the air and hit the pavement with a second gut-wrenching crunch. A crowd of passersby formed around the man, who was bleeding from the head.

And everyone just gathered around, watching.

Our friend hesitated. The teachers said not to get involved. All the foreigners in our NGO are warned during orientation that getting involved in accidents is dangerous. A person’s voluntary involvement is often interpreted as guilt, and our foreign presence can escalate potentially volatile situations. Some people started to try and move the man — he was blocking traffic.

Another classmate friend, a nurse from the UK, was also at the accident scene and she tended the man before the ambulance arrived, which took over 45 minutes. The man was in shock, and our friends heard later that he died at the hospital. They still wince at the memory of the sound of the impacts.

Example 2: “Did anybody die?” (from Peter Hessler’s River Town)
We read Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) to one another as a bedtime story, and he witnessed this phenomenon in different forms during his years in Sichuan province. After praising the way families in Fuling cared for their members — how the elderly are given a sense of purpose and involvement, how family members demonstrate a high degree of selflessness and self-sacrifice relative to typical American families — he makes an observation echoed often in our culture readings: step outside the in-group (family, important connections, guests), and these same heroically self-sacrificing people can appear unbelievably calloused and indifferent to the needs and suffering of others.

Hessler illustrates this with several everyday examples: ticket booth “piles, great pushing mobs in which every person fought forward with no concern for anybody else”, people watching pickpockets rob strangers yet saying nothing, and traffic accidents:

Crowds often formed in Fuling, but I rarely saw them act as a group out of any moral sense. I had witnessed that far more in individualistic America… Certainly there is rubbernecking in America as well, but it was nothing compared to what I saw in Fuling, where the average citizen seemed to react to a person in trouble by thinking: This is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch him suffer. When there were serious car accidents, people would rush over, shouting eagerly as they ran, “Sǐ le méi yǒu? Sǐ le méi yǒu?” — Is anybody dead? Is anybody dead?

…usually I watched the faces of the crowd rather than the actors themselves, and in their expressions it was hard to recognize anything other than that single eager observation: something was happening [pp.112-113].

Examples 3 & 4: Helping is hazardous… and foreign
We were all warned during orientation that if we voluntarily helped out at an accident scene in China, it could be interpreted as guilt. They weren’t kidding.

An American friend of ours saw an old man fall off his three-wheel cart. Two other bike riders had come against the flow of traffic in the bike lane and the old man fell while trying to avoid them. The two riders took off but our friend stayed to make sure the old man was alright. But the old man blamed our friend and called the police! Only after repeatedly telling his side of the story for a few hours at the police station did the police finally decide that our friend was just a dumb foreigner who didn’t know any better and let him go. The idea that someone would stop to help out a stranger and not have some ulterior motive is apparently a foreign concept.

Another time, a man on a bike was waiting at a red light, and I watched him watch an old man tumble off his bike into the road right in front of him. If I’d opened the door of my taxi I could have hit him where he sat on his bike acting like there wasn’t a senior citizen lying in the road at his feet. Maybe I should have. I tried to get his attention, but he avoided eye contact. The old man picked himself up with a few grimaces and went on his way.

Example 5: How to get help
This comic is an example of something obvious that’s easy to forget: Chinese people are well aware of their own social problems. Here, an old man has fallen getting off a bus, a crowd has formed to watch, but the bystanders hold voice recorders and won’t help until the man clearly says that he fell by himself (and therefore no one is at fault). They’re afraid that if they help, they’ll end up like our friend in Example 3. One man is asking the old man to please say it again for his voice recorder because he didn’t hear clearly the first time. (Click the photo to read uncensored translated comments on this comic from the Chinese internet.)

More Examples
When unfamiliar or unknown foreign cultural factors are involved, it’s sometimes hard to know what to do in sudden situations that cry out for a Good Samaritan. Michael at expatriate games shares his sad experience of trying (and failing) to stop a guy from jumping off a bridge, and trying (and failing) to get the people watching to do something, like phone China’s 911. ~~William at Reflections in a Chinese Eye gives a quick list of the dicey situations he encountered while in China, and what he did in each one.~~ We’ve experienced similar incidents of indecision: Once I ran down to intervene when a woman’s boyfriend was physically and verbally abusive to her in public but was too late. Other times we’ve seen children being beaten in public by out of control mothers and no one intervened, etc. Occasionally stories like these end up in the news(translated): “Elderly falls in the middle of the road, no one helps because fear of being framed.”

Up Next…

Obviously this isn’t an attractive part of Chinese culture. However, poor understanding will just make it look even worse. Also, well-intentioned foreigners could get into a lot of trouble if they intervene without understanding enough what’s going on. The next post, The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2), samples what some Chinese culture scholars (both Chinese and foreign) have to say about the cultural factors underneath the kinds of behaviour described above and why people in China tend to act this way.

Related Articles: