The good old days of Good Samaritans are gone for good
Respect for the old and care for the young are traditional virtues of the Chinese people'. For centuries, mainlanders have been brought up with that tenet instilled in their minds, through teachings by their parents and teachers.
It is seen as their filial duty to care for their own parents, and by extension, the elderly in general. Lending a hand to an elderly person in need of help, whether by offering them a guiding hand across the road or helping them get up after they have fallen in the street, has long been considered a virtuous given.
Over the past week, however, that ancestral inscription has been turned upside down. Intense debate has gripped the mainland, over whether it is a good idea to assist elderly people who are in physical distress and over the declining morality in the country, which is widely seen these days as being money-driven above all else.
To make matters worse, an ill-timed release of government guidelines on how to aid the elderly has added to the controversy.
It all started early last week when state media reported that an 88-year-old man in Hubei collapsed on the pavement and was left unattended, despite being surrounded by a crowd of onlookers for about 90 minutes, until his son and wife arrived. He reportedly died from suffocation, caused by a nosebleed blocking his airway, after being sent to the hospital.
While there have been a number of recent cases where elderly people have gone unassisted, this case grabbed national attention, probably because the crowd of onlookers and passers-by not only did not bother lending a hand but also failed to call for emergency services. The case was even sadder in a sense that mainlanders were making last-minute preparations and rushing home last week to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls today, with their own parents or grandparents.
Naturally, the commentators have lamented on the declining morality and social ethics in a fast-changing society in which the money-driven culture has led the people to avoid helping strangers out of fear that they could be wrongly blamed for causing the accident in the first place and could end up paying compensation or even facing lawsuits.
Indeed, there have been a few high-profile cases in which elderly people who fell down accused the helpers of causing their falls.
However, a couple of days after state media reported on the tragic death of the old man in Hubei, the Ministry of Health released a 41-page guidebook including suggestions on aiding elderly people and warning that the hasty assistance given to an elderly person suffering from a fall - a leading cause of injuries and death among the country's elderly - could risk causing unnecessary injuries.
Officials denied that the release of the guidelines was a direct response to the death of the old man and said the guidelines were in the works for more than two years, and that they had timed for release to mark World First Aid Day, which fell on Saturday. But most mainlanders think otherwise, taking the guidelines as an official warning to Good Samaritans.
In a wider context, it is hard for a Good Samaritan to spread goodwill, because more and more mainlanders nowadays suspect a motive behind anything, not least because they have been inundated with almost daily media reports of examples of moral declines, with unscrupulous people going to any length to make money or cheat others out of it.
In other words, the days of good people are long gone. At least that is what the relatives of an elderly woman in Zhaoqing, Guangdong, told a young man who tried to help her in the latest example.
According to the reports, the young man, identified as Ah Hua, was riding a motorcycle to buy breakfast on the morning of July 15 when he saw a woman in her 70s fall from her bicycle. After he stopped and helped her up, the woman accused him of causing the fall. After her relatives arrived, her son-in-law reportedly refused to hear his explanation and shouted, 'Why did you try to help while others did not? How come you helped her if you did not cause her fall? The good-hearted people are long dead'.
In the ensuing three days, the young man took leave from work and tried hard to find witnesses in the surrounding areas while the police confiscated the young man's motorcycle as evidence.
Only on the third day did the elderly woman admit that her fall had nothing to do with the young man, after the police said they started to go through the traffic camera recordings to trace her route.
