In China, trouble is too often the reward for being a Good Samaritan

As reported last week, a Chinese crowd on a subway in Shanghai ran away from a fainting foreigner. He slumped over, eventually fell to the ground, and was left alone in the subway car. This has once again sparked debate about the callousness of the Chinese public and whether modern society has somehow made China's citizens unwilling to aid those in obvious need.

This soul-searching is ongoing. It was perhaps never so anguished as after the death of Wang Yue - a two-year-old girl who was hit by two vehicles in Guangdong and ignored by at least 18 passers-by before anyone assisted her - but the capacity of crowds in China to turn a blind eye to basic human suffering is nothing new.

I passed out on a subway in Shanghai in 2001. It was rush hour, so I was standing: a smartly dressed 21-year old foreign woman commuting to my office. It was a full subway car, but nobody broke my fall, causing me to land on my face. When I was treated for my injuries, I was told the only reason I still have real teeth is thanks to a permanent retainer which spread the impact across my mouth.

In my case, people didn't flee the car. But when I regained consciousness, lying on the floor in a small pool of my own blood, I noticed we were stopping and the doors were opening. I asked, in Putonghua, whether this was Dongfang Road, my stop. The responses from my fellow passengers were to shout to each other, "Hey, that foreigner speaks really good Chinese!" One person did address me, telling me my Putonghua was great. I managed to read the signs outside the car and crawl off the train myself.

Thankfully a colleague was in another carriage on the same train and ran over to assist me, alerting the station employees as she did so.

At the time, I felt as though needing to have my jaw reworked was the lesser of my injuries. I was hurt that, even after spending a good portion of my young life in China and speaking the language, I was still seen as a foreigner first, a human bleeding on the floor and in need of assistance second. The case of Wang Yue, however, makes plain that it is not just foreigners who cause crowds to turn away.

The public discourse on these cases tends to take a philosophical bent, focusing on questions of common decency, modernity's destruction of traditional values, or whether increased wealth has caused a decline in compassion and morality. But a more nuanced view may require examining Chinese law and its treatment of Good Samaritans.