China! China! China!

Many years ago, when we were living in Australia, someone made a racist comment to our friend Ping Ping's four year old son, who came home crying, and so, in a fury, the family packed their bags and returned to China!

Five months later, they were back.  "What happened?" I asked Ping Ping.

She immediately broke down in tears and it took a while to get the story, but what happened was that, back in Beijing, her beloved uncle fell off a ferry into the Yangtze River. He was a good swimmer so was making his way to the bank when a passing boat's propeller sliced off his arm. Ping Ping had viewed the surveillance tapes on behalf of his grieving family and was chilled to the bone that they showed him screaming for help for an hour and forty five minutes with no one on the river bank or in any of the passing boats taking the slightest bit of notice. It wasn't until he was well and truly dead that he was fished out and returned, without ceremony or warning, to his family.  It was all just so awful that Ping Ping couldn't tell anyone, until me, what she'd witnessed.

"I can no longer live among people who behave like that!" said Ping Ping!

We talked about how and why no one cared to rescue a dying man and attributed the lack of action to decades of Communism and their stupid rules on the protocols of rescue, which, if broken, could get you executed ... but then we got more philosophical and decided that it also had something to do with how neither Buddhism nor Taoism have a remit to Charity or looking out for others' wellbeing ... but, if we wanted to be strictly accurate, it actually went back to Confucianism, since Confucius said that if you saved anyone's life, you then had to take care of them for the remainder of their now-extended natural life, which could get rather expensive.

I was thinking about this after watching the news last night and seeing what happened to the two year old girl in China who was run over by two separate cars and left to die on the street, with ever so many folks simply stepping over her.

It was just so awful I do hope something good comes out of this. Apparently the Chinese bloggers are up in arms over it, and everyone across the Mainland is talking about it, but I do hope it extends to proper questions being asked of Chinese Culture and Religions and maybe even to the adoption of a little "Christian Charity", for the want of a better phrase.

It isn't impossible. In Hong Kong, we've had years of the "Show You Have a Good Heart" campaign, with posters and ads everywhere.  It just asks that you show charity to others ... and, yeah, yeah, it sort of works, although ... no, let's not go there!