Forgetting the laws, what sort of people can so casually kill like this? There are basic human instincts not to hurt people. Armies have to train soldiers to ignore these feelings because without training most won't kill even under combat situations. So when I see someone kill so casually I have to believe that they have rehearsed the scenario in their head beforehand. That means a large number of chinese people drive around with a plan in their head covering how to kill should they injure someone. They are mentally prepared at all times to commit murder on demand. That's messed up. It does not speak well of the country or its citizens when they travel abroad.
I have been living in china for over 10 years and I came to the conclusion that what you assume here as being "basic human instincts" is really the result of the culture and the education that shaped us. Let a human being grow with no rules and awareness of good or bad, where the only law is "what is good for you well is good", then you end up with this kind of behaviour.
I think you have to look at this from a certain perspective. Think about it, this is a country of 1.3 billion people. How often does this actually happen?
Secondly, think about incentives. Maybe I am hopelessly naive, but I believe that the majority of human beings have something built into them that stops them from hurting others. For the majority of humanity, you don't need laws against murder, internal morality and social pressure is sufficient. However, this is a small subset of humanity that would make RATIONAL rather than MORAL choices about murder if forced to make a choice about it. This is the reason that murder has such high penalties, for those people.
tldr; China needs to raise the expected penalty for engaging in this sort of behavior to the point that it is not rational. This isn't necessary for the great majority of Chinese (any more than it is anywhere else in the world) but it is necessary for some.
From what little I know about this, which is listening to locals and some foreigners, this comes from the perverse incentive where maiming costs more than the manslaughter payout. It's from advice of prior extortion victims, accounts from the news, hearsay from friends, etc. The incentive is that trying to help a maimed person can cost you dearly. This same thing is why you don't see "good Samaritans". Good Samaritans get taken advantage of. Poole take a sign of help as a sign of guilt.
Interpreting help as a sign of guilt is very strong and has become a strong reason people look the other way instead of helping someone in a bad position, sadly.
People throughout history have killed, seemingly casually. It's human nature. I would contend that modern society has instilled these feelings of guilt associated with murder specifically against the natural tendency of man.
This is a country that just a generation ago went through the Mao famines, that murdered 50 to 100 million people through forced starvation. As recently as a few decades ago, they still had traditional gulags, and still have re-education camps. During one stretch a decade ago, they famously were executing people in large numbers in stadiums via firing squad, to rapidly 'solve' outstanding crimes - they still do this to a lesser extent today [1].
Even now, the value of life in western China is considered very low. They have half a billion people living on $2 to $3 per day. I don't think there's a single example of such a poor country that has had a first world style (eg Sweden, Canada or Germany) consideration for the bottom 50%.
In the US, there is no incentive for psychopaths to kill people like this. In China there is.
Also remember that the incidence of this in a country the size of China doesn't allow you to make comparison to the US. Our population is much smaller.
Lastly, the per-capita murder rate in the US is higher (we rank 110, they rank 192) [1]. Even if you account for under-reporting in China, we have a more violent society.
People outside China Mainland is hard to imagine the truth behind the news. It's so sad that I have to say the drivers were insane but not totally unreasonable ( Apparently, I'm not agree to what they did or thought ).
In China Mainland, if you drive and hit someone to death, a compensation no more than 15,000 USD will be paid for victim's family. However, if the victim was badly hit the medical expenses could easily reach 15,000 USD and probably beyond 50,000 USD or more. And in that situation, China's terrible medical/car crash insurance can only help a little.
1. It is basic human instinct to not hurt people.
2. Training can overcome this instinct.
3. Therefore these murderers must have trained themselves.
4. Therefore there are a lot of people in China who must have trained themselves to kill.
5. This all reflects badly on all of China when citizens visit other countries.
Can someone explain why it is reasonable to assume that mental training (2), as opposed to perverse incentives and corruption as the article mentions, is the only way to overcome (1), and why, even assuming (4) to be true, (5) is also true?
Psychopaths with incentives. Like as you said, people normally don't kill others, even when heavily incentivised to do so. In this case, the laws provided perverse incentives, and in a country with so many people, it is not surprising that psychopaths are involved in traffic accidents every day.
Interpreting this as somehow about Chinese culture etc. seems to be over the top IMO. Sure that law is bad, but other than that, there is no news here.
In this case it's kill or get your life ruined/killed/become a slave to your debt.
The solution is rather simple though: make killing more expensive then injury. Best solution would be to reduce the cost of injury, and chuck the rest up to socialism. But it looks like communism China doesn't know socialism ?
I have a thoery that a human life isn't as valuable in places with huge populations.
I rem reading about how people value time so much in the Scandinavian countries because they see so little of the Sun and how in tropical countries the concept of punctuality is close to non existent.
People who drive cars. There's a long standing history in the US where once you put somebody behind the wheel of a car, there's an increased disdain for people not in cars, and risks are commonly taken that threaten pedestrians and cyclists and other drivers.
This just seems like a logical progression of cars in the US to cars in China.
The same way we eat a dead cow because hey, cheap $1 protein with ketchup. It's habit and no reason to stop and think it through, plus everyone does it so it must be ok.
it's the same in many states in the US... for example, if you are going to shoot someone, make sure that you kill them, if you don't want to go to jail...
I could not finish this article. I have read about and seen a lot of disturbing things, but this bothers me far more than any horror movie or shock film ever could. The situation exposed in this article evidences something really fundamental about human nature: the banality of evil.
That someone could run over a toddler and then reverse back and forth over them just so they only have to pay $50,000 instead of $400,000 — well, it's absolutely sickening.
Time and again I'm reminded that most people are really only "good" because it benefits them personally in some way. But the ease with which so many people simply rationalize away all the horrors that mankind commits — I suppose that's part of the human genome.
Yes it's sickening, and also broadly understood to be a logical thing to do in China.
Let's play the devil's advocate and understand the motive behind it-
The average annual wage of a Chinese citizen is $7,500 USD, whereas the average annual wage of an American is $45,000.
Which means that $400,000 is worth 400,000 x 45,000 / 7,500 = $2,400,000 . And that's only over 23 years so far. You have to keep paying until the day the victim dies. That's the equivalent of $105,000 for Americans per year.
If you refuse to pay, the victim will take you to court and confiscate all your belongings. If you still refuse to get a job to pay, the court will throw your ass in jail and (here is the important part) force your family to pay, indefinitely, until the victim dies.
So are you going to have your family pays $105,000 per year while you sit in jail, or are you going to make sure the victim is dead?
Trust me when I say no one wants to kill another human, but when the law is lay against you in such way, well don't be surprise that humans can override their natural instinct.
(I am from Hong Kong that, while most people there do not share the same sentiment, but can understand the math behind this horrific logic.
> Time and again I'm reminded that most people are really only "good" because it benefits them personally in some way.
I don't know if that's the general nature of people though - I think when people have enough, but not too much, they're generally good. But if you're below or above that middle bound, things start to go bad. If you're below, natural hunger and base instincts for survival drive your behavior. But if you're above that "safe" level, it seems like a lot of people go a little wonky - lots of people who get to a significantly higher level, it's almost like it sets off a switch in their brain and it turns into a game, where they can't resist seeing how much they can get, damn the consequences.
1. The article notes that the monetary cost to the driver for accidentally killing someone is much less than the cost for accidentally disabling someone.
For drivers that do not have much wealth, and who are the sole source of income for their family, I can see how [1] they might decide that the harm to their family from having to pay that higher cost might outweigh the harm from killing a stranger. People tend to value their immediate family very much more than they value strangers.
However, it seems a lot of these cases were people driving expensive luxury cars. For people with the incomes or wealth to afford those cars, is the cost difference enough to actually cause serious hardship for them or their family?
2. How does this work when the pedestrian is a foreigner, such as a tourist or a business traveler?
Do drivers know that (1) these people will have their medical bills taken care of by insurance or the national healthcare systems of their home countries, so there is no need to kill them, and (2) it would really piss off their home country, which would cause severe diplomatic pressure on China to seriously punish the driver?
3. Drivers certainly cannot count on always being able to finish off any pedestrian they hit. Why hasn't an insurance market sprung up to deal with the risk of disabling pedestrians?
[1] Note: "I can see how" is not meant to mean "I approve of". It is observational, not judgmental.
I'm reminded that many land mines are designed to maim rather than kill, maximizing the cost to the enemy by forcing them to care for wounded casualties.
There's a similar dynamic in Mexico. Causing injury can mean responsibility for lifetime care. Another factor is Napoleonic law aka presumption of guilt. So one may end up in jail until trial. The third factor is ubiquitous graft. After an accident, the party with the most cash gets to tell the official story. So yes, advice is to flee with plates and registration (if any). But I didn't get that killing victims was commonplace.
In Brazil the punishment for murder is lesser than many other crimes, leading to people murdering investigators (or in one particularly infamous case, a mayor murdered two environmental cops that were going to investigate his farm, got convicted, but still got re-elected).
Also firing a gun and not hitting anything also has a harsher punishment than hitting someone, so unless you are a cop that need to draw attention or something, if you need to fire a gun, you need to make sure you will hit someone.
Not the same, but...an anecdote from when I went through driver's education. This was many moons ago and it was meant tongue in cheek, with a bit of truth -- if you hit a pedestrian to the point they are severely injured, you better hope they don't survive.
Thinking seems to be -- A car versus a pedestrian (or cyclist) unless a glancing blow is going to do a lot of damage to the ped/cyclist. Personal liability could be huge in the case of injury, much more so (potentially) than wrongful death.
We see this commonly in the Bay Area in motorist killing a cyclist, the criminal penalty (if any) is often not as severe as it should be.
(The above said, even when the motorist hits and the ped/cyclist survives, getting justice can be long and involved -- classic case is the Los Gatos/Los Altos business man who severely impacted a cyclist who was permanently injured -- http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_20884491/saratoga-businessman-... )
I don't advocate such, just a story and some bay area experiences I remember.
The story in the intro doesnt match the well-publicized video of the accident, which is on YouTube. The driver does NOT switch into reverse, and the grandmother does not scream for the driver to stop. So unless there was another toddler run-over by a white vehicle in the same city, the driver just made shit up. WTH???
The story emphasizes laws on monetary compensation for victims, which I think misses the point entirely. The real reason people are doing this is because they can commit murder and apparently they are not punished for it. If you deliberately run over a living person to kill him, that is murder.
Everything is about money when the amount is huge, anything else, including killing, comes to the second.
I don't believe anyone enjoys killing there, however when it's tied with huge chunks of money, many of them will choose to kill instead of leaving a disabled human being on wheelchair keeping asking for lifelong financial support. It's indeed similar to the gun-shoot case in USA, either you don't pull the trigger, or you make sure the target is absolutely dead, that explains some victims have lots of gunshots on their body.
When the state only thinks about money, people will turn into objects. The population will start to see other humans less valuable than their dinner table and will do their best to exploit them. If you go to China you will see beautiful landscapes, the lineage of one of the most advanced cultures and you will see the pain and the loneliness of its inhabitants. The rest of the world didn't cure the infection in time and now has grown to necrosis at the point that sociopathy it's the norm rather than the exception.
I'm a native living in China. After glancing over the article, I don't bother reading it in details. The title sounds ridiculous, but certainly marketable.
I see people here are generally sensible but also emotional. I don't have country level statistics related to these extreme behaviors. But people around me are all very kind and I know many having very high standard of morality. We're constantly chasing for the positive and good.
People's actions are the reflection of the real laws/rules in their group. And people tend to take advantage of it. Thinking about killing someone would make you lose way less, is it still a normal world? Why didn't those "killers" take equivalent responsibilities? That's the real why.
In many of these cases bribes are what get people off not stupidity.
PS: Granted, in a functional democracy changing the perverse incentives is a much better option. But, unfortunately in China the only reasonable response to this IMO is to find and brutally kill the driver and then publish this after the fact. Accidents happen, but murder should never end up as the 'better' option.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k4renio|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthoganol|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_cagle|10 years ago|reply
Secondly, think about incentives. Maybe I am hopelessly naive, but I believe that the majority of human beings have something built into them that stops them from hurting others. For the majority of humanity, you don't need laws against murder, internal morality and social pressure is sufficient. However, this is a small subset of humanity that would make RATIONAL rather than MORAL choices about murder if forced to make a choice about it. This is the reason that murder has such high penalties, for those people.
tldr; China needs to raise the expected penalty for engaging in this sort of behavior to the point that it is not rational. This isn't necessary for the great majority of Chinese (any more than it is anywhere else in the world) but it is necessary for some.
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
Interpreting help as a sign of guilt is very strong and has become a strong reason people look the other way instead of helping someone in a bad position, sadly.
[+] [-] copperx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvnick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|10 years ago|reply
Even now, the value of life in western China is considered very low. They have half a billion people living on $2 to $3 per day. I don't think there's a single example of such a poor country that has had a first world style (eg Sweden, Canada or Germany) consideration for the bottom 50%.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/28/china-arrests-terro...
[+] [-] dghughes|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
In the US, there is no incentive for psychopaths to kill people like this. In China there is.
Also remember that the incidence of this in a country the size of China doesn't allow you to make comparison to the US. Our population is much smaller.
Lastly, the per-capita murder rate in the US is higher (we rank 110, they rank 192) [1]. Even if you account for under-reporting in China, we have a more violent society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... sort by rate
[+] [-] AntiGameZ|10 years ago|reply
In China Mainland, if you drive and hit someone to death, a compensation no more than 15,000 USD will be paid for victim's family. However, if the victim was badly hit the medical expenses could easily reach 15,000 USD and probably beyond 50,000 USD or more. And in that situation, China's terrible medical/car crash insurance can only help a little.
[+] [-] agsa|10 years ago|reply
1. It is basic human instinct to not hurt people. 2. Training can overcome this instinct. 3. Therefore these murderers must have trained themselves. 4. Therefore there are a lot of people in China who must have trained themselves to kill. 5. This all reflects badly on all of China when citizens visit other countries.
Can someone explain why it is reasonable to assume that mental training (2), as opposed to perverse incentives and corruption as the article mentions, is the only way to overcome (1), and why, even assuming (4) to be true, (5) is also true?
[+] [-] sukruh|10 years ago|reply
Interpreting this as somehow about Chinese culture etc. seems to be over the top IMO. Sure that law is bad, but other than that, there is no news here.
[+] [-] Qantourisc|10 years ago|reply
The solution is rather simple though: make killing more expensive then injury. Best solution would be to reduce the cost of injury, and chuck the rest up to socialism. But it looks like communism China doesn't know socialism ?
[+] [-] ignoramous|10 years ago|reply
I rem reading about how people value time so much in the Scandinavian countries because they see so little of the Sun and how in tropical countries the concept of punctuality is close to non existent.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ojbyrne|10 years ago|reply
This just seems like a logical progression of cars in the US to cars in China.
[+] [-] brador|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totony|10 years ago|reply
citation needed
I don't think this is "human instinct". Looks more like a moral construct.
[+] [-] titfn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TickleMeHellNo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|10 years ago|reply
That someone could run over a toddler and then reverse back and forth over them just so they only have to pay $50,000 instead of $400,000 — well, it's absolutely sickening.
Time and again I'm reminded that most people are really only "good" because it benefits them personally in some way. But the ease with which so many people simply rationalize away all the horrors that mankind commits — I suppose that's part of the human genome.
This really depresses me.
[+] [-] guardiangod|10 years ago|reply
Let's play the devil's advocate and understand the motive behind it-
The average annual wage of a Chinese citizen is $7,500 USD, whereas the average annual wage of an American is $45,000.
Which means that $400,000 is worth 400,000 x 45,000 / 7,500 = $2,400,000 . And that's only over 23 years so far. You have to keep paying until the day the victim dies. That's the equivalent of $105,000 for Americans per year.
If you refuse to pay, the victim will take you to court and confiscate all your belongings. If you still refuse to get a job to pay, the court will throw your ass in jail and (here is the important part) force your family to pay, indefinitely, until the victim dies.
So are you going to have your family pays $105,000 per year while you sit in jail, or are you going to make sure the victim is dead?
Trust me when I say no one wants to kill another human, but when the law is lay against you in such way, well don't be surprise that humans can override their natural instinct.
(I am from Hong Kong that, while most people there do not share the same sentiment, but can understand the math behind this horrific logic.
[+] [-] modarts|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|10 years ago|reply
I don't know if that's the general nature of people though - I think when people have enough, but not too much, they're generally good. But if you're below or above that middle bound, things start to go bad. If you're below, natural hunger and base instincts for survival drive your behavior. But if you're above that "safe" level, it seems like a lot of people go a little wonky - lots of people who get to a significantly higher level, it's almost like it sets off a switch in their brain and it turns into a game, where they can't resist seeing how much they can get, damn the consequences.
[+] [-] the_economist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|10 years ago|reply
1. The article notes that the monetary cost to the driver for accidentally killing someone is much less than the cost for accidentally disabling someone.
For drivers that do not have much wealth, and who are the sole source of income for their family, I can see how [1] they might decide that the harm to their family from having to pay that higher cost might outweigh the harm from killing a stranger. People tend to value their immediate family very much more than they value strangers.
However, it seems a lot of these cases were people driving expensive luxury cars. For people with the incomes or wealth to afford those cars, is the cost difference enough to actually cause serious hardship for them or their family?
2. How does this work when the pedestrian is a foreigner, such as a tourist or a business traveler?
Do drivers know that (1) these people will have their medical bills taken care of by insurance or the national healthcare systems of their home countries, so there is no need to kill them, and (2) it would really piss off their home country, which would cause severe diplomatic pressure on China to seriously punish the driver?
3. Drivers certainly cannot count on always being able to finish off any pedestrian they hit. Why hasn't an insurance market sprung up to deal with the risk of disabling pedestrians?
[1] Note: "I can see how" is not meant to mean "I approve of". It is observational, not judgmental.
[+] [-] rectang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|10 years ago|reply
Also firing a gun and not hitting anything also has a harsher punishment than hitting someone, so unless you are a cop that need to draw attention or something, if you need to fire a gun, you need to make sure you will hit someone.
[+] [-] jmspring|10 years ago|reply
Thinking seems to be -- A car versus a pedestrian (or cyclist) unless a glancing blow is going to do a lot of damage to the ped/cyclist. Personal liability could be huge in the case of injury, much more so (potentially) than wrongful death.
We see this commonly in the Bay Area in motorist killing a cyclist, the criminal penalty (if any) is often not as severe as it should be.
(The above said, even when the motorist hits and the ped/cyclist survives, getting justice can be long and involved -- classic case is the Los Gatos/Los Altos business man who severely impacted a cyclist who was permanently injured -- http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_20884491/saratoga-businessman-... )
I don't advocate such, just a story and some bay area experiences I remember.
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzhahou|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] massysett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|10 years ago|reply
I don't believe anyone enjoys killing there, however when it's tied with huge chunks of money, many of them will choose to kill instead of leaving a disabled human being on wheelchair keeping asking for lifelong financial support. It's indeed similar to the gun-shoot case in USA, either you don't pull the trigger, or you make sure the target is absolutely dead, that explains some victims have lots of gunshots on their body.
The law must be adapted to deal with this.
[+] [-] argklm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bohrshaw|10 years ago|reply
I see people here are generally sensible but also emotional. I don't have country level statistics related to these extreme behaviors. But people around me are all very kind and I know many having very high standard of morality. We're constantly chasing for the positive and good.
[+] [-] LiweiZ|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgraczyk|10 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that wasn't explained in the article.
[+] [-] ilaksh|10 years ago|reply
Also, what penalties do people pay in the US if they accidentally cripple someone?
[+] [-] kelukelugames|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iradik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
PS: Granted, in a functional democracy changing the perverse incentives is a much better option. But, unfortunately in China the only reasonable response to this IMO is to find and brutally kill the driver and then publish this after the fact. Accidents happen, but murder should never end up as the 'better' option.