The China Teaching Web

Recently, a Chinese work colleague of mine, who is six months pregnant, was buying pork at a small street market near her apartment. As she was paying for the pork, a man on a bicycle rode by, reached into her purse and removed her wallet. She did not notice the missing wallet until hours later when she wanted to pay for something with an ATM card. While the wallet only contained 500 RMB, she also lost her ID and credit cards which will be more difficult for her to replace.

“If you did not see your wallet get stolen then how did you know about the man on the bicycle?” I asked her later.

“I went to talk to the man who sold me the pork,” she explained, “and he told me that other vendors nearby had witnessed the whole thing.”

“Why didn’t they help you if they saw it happening?” I was surprised that two men would not have done more to assist a pregnant woman who was an obvious target for thieves.

“They were afraid of getting hurt,” she responded. She acted as if she was not the least perturbed that the men had stood by and let the theft occur. “The guy could have pulled a knife on them. They did what anyone else in China would have done.”

“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the pork vendor and the vendors nearby were accomplices?” I inquired. “If I were you, I would go  back to the pork dealer and tell him to produce more information about who the thief was or you will call the police and have them question him about it.”

“No, no,” she laughed. “What good would that do? I don’t think he had anything to do with it. He just didn’t want to get involved.” The conversation ended there but I was not convinced although I was hardly surprised about what had happened to her.

Some months earlier, I had been walking through a busy marketplace with some friends when I noticed a very strange situation. A lady was buying dumplings from a street vendor seemingly unaware that a man was crouched behind her with his hands outstretched towards her purse.

“Isn’t that a thief?” I asked my friends. They looked in the direction that I was pointing and quickly confirmed that my suspicion was true.

“I think that we should alert the lady,” I whispered, assuming that the same idea had already occured to my friends.

“No!” one of my male friends warned. “It’s better to keep quiet and see what happens. I just could not stand there and do nothing. I yelled at the thief who quickly stood up and ran off. The lady whirled around simultaneously hugging her purse to her chest.

“What were you doing?” another friend asked me later in an irritated voice. “Don’t you realize that you could have gotten hurt? What if he had come after you?” And what if that was my mother? I thought. I would hope that someone would do the same for her.

Unfortunately, the concept of a ‘Good Samaritan’ is not widely present in Chinese society. Chinese people often see themselves as little ants in an overpopulated world and it is hard for them to imagine that any good could come out of helping a stranger.

A former student of mine, who works as a model in one of China’s biggest industrial cities, has been robbed three times in the last year by men on motorcycles. In the most recent incident, she was walking down the bike lane of a major thoroughfare when a motorcycle suddenly sped by her and two hands grabbed the purse off her shoulders. Unfortunately, it was not a clean grab and my friend was roughly knocked to the ground. As she laid on the side of the street in shock, many people passed by and took a good long look at her but no one stopped to see if she needed help.

“My knees were skinned and my face was scraped and I was crying,” she recalled, “but no one came to assist me. No one even called the police.

Not that calling the police would have helped. Another friend in the same city watched in horror one night as a man destroyed the lock on her door and broke into her apartment. He chased her into the bathroom but she was able to slam and lock the door before he could get to her. While he tried to beat the door open, she called the police on her cell phone. The dispatcher curtly told my friend that the police were too busy that night to respond to her call immediately. Fortunately, the man gave up on trying to get into the bathroom but when the police arrive more than two hours later, the robber had already made off with a considerable amount of money and electronics.

With a police force that is either too small or ‘otherwise’ occupied with other matters to deal with emergencies, one would hope that ordinary citizens would step in and try to help their fellow countrymen when necessary.

“It’s just too dangerous,” a student told me in class recently. “We have to look out for ourselves and can’t risk getting hurt.”

While most people here who have heard of the Golden Rule agree that it is a good social policy in theory, too many think that it is too difficult to follow through with in every day life in China.

It is no wonder then - in a country where few Good Samaritans exist  and the police are often too busy to be bothered - that thieves and robbers abound and are able to prey on their victims so freely. I just wonder how many people stood by and watched as thieves stole two cell phone from me on various buses in China or how many saw a man break into my apartment two years ago and did nothing simply because it was “too dangerous.’