By 
Could the fear of being falsely accused or sued in court have resulted in people ignoring the bloodied body of a two-year-old girl who lay dying on a street in China?
In a strange twist to the tragic hit-and-run accident in the southern Chinese city of Foshan, online commentators in China are saying that these passers-by could possibly have refused to help precisely because they feared being accused of injuring the girl.
According to China Digital Times, netizens said there is a fear of extortion among the Chinese who witness public injury.
The video of the accident, which has since gone viral, shows two-year-old Wang Yue being ignored by nearly 20 passers-by even as she lay dying after being run over twice by vans. A trash collector eventually later notices her and alerts her mother, who rushes her to hospital.
The toddler is now in a coma and is likely to remain in a vegetative state if she survives, according to reports quoting the Guangzhou Military District General Hospital’s head of neurosurgery.
Online commentators pointed to a 2006 case wherein a resident of Nanjing, Peng Yu, helped an old woman who had fallen only to have her accuse him of causing the injury.
A judge subsequently ruled in favour of the plaintiff, saying that Peng would not have helped the woman if he did not cause the fall. The case was later settled in an agreement but Peng still paid 10 per cent of the costs.
This controversial ruling seems to have eroded the country’s ethics, netizens fear.
A recent online poll found that in China, 84 per cent of respondents would not offer assistance to an elderly person who falls on the street for fear of extortion, reported the site.
In August this year, a bus driver in east China’s Jiangsu province helped an 81-year-old woman lying on the ground by the side of her overturned bicycle.
She later told the police the bus driver had hit her but a video camera on the bus showed she was lying.
A month later, an 88-year-old man in Wuhan fell on the streets about 100 meters from his home and remained lying face down on the ground, until an ambulance arrived ninety minutes later, according to a China Daily report.
He died because his respiratory tract was clogged by a nosebleed, but might have survived if someone turned him over, the report noted. But none of the passes-by in the Wuhan, Hubei province offered a hand.
Watch the footage (viewer discretion advised):
757 comments