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.
Yes. Any who have not visited China should keep in mind the people there do not feel protected by their government. They feel oppressed. They know they can't openly criticize the system or they will be hassled or sent to prison for "stirring up trouble". So, it is every man for himself and you get human behavior like this. They're not naturally evil, they just don't have the benefits we do.
The best illustration I've seen of this for anyone who hasn't visited Asia and seen the effects of censorship is this video. One guy asks random people on the street on June 4 if they know what day it is. It is the anniversary of the Tienanmen square massacre. And nearly everyone refuses to answer. They know it was a tragedy and they also know they aren't allowed to talk about it.
The video shows educated people probably around the Beijing university that is not really representative of what is really going on. 99% of the population is oblivious and brain washed. They have really no idea about the tiananmen massacre.
You're right the general public really doesn't know. Sorry, I generalized in my previous comment. Would you agree that the reason that the general public does not know is because the interviewed folks have been censored and self censored?
Yes it is censored ship but it goes beyond banned interviews, they filter all information. I think the most effective tool is selective teaching in school. Whole blocks of history are being ignored or re-written. The history teaching emphasise on how China has been bullied by the whole world in order to seed patriotism, while numerous TV shows and movies make sure to keep those memories fresh.
Gotcha. In defense of their government, which I will almost never ever do, I don't know whether China historically got a fair shake or not. The Japanese, for example, never did say sorry for WW II and Nanjing. At least China didn't lose !
I imagine things haven't been completely fair for China, but that's life and everyone's pretty much in the same boat. I'm sure you will agree that teaching your citizens to distrust the rest of the world doesn't seem practical in today's global society. China, 中國, is no longer "the middle", it is one of many.
This is spot on. There's a reason that people's last name comes before their first over there. It's a low trust society where the only thing that matters is your clan.
Last name first has nothing to do with trust. Japan is one of the highest-trust societies in the world (see crime stats) and last name comes first. I live in China and have lived 13 years in Japan so I know what I am talking about.
The order of the last name shows the importance of your family over yourself. Family is far more important over there because it better shields you from society, while simultaneously contributing to the ills of society, i.e. too much self interest vs concern for the whole society; leading to a very difficult to break circular pattern of corruption.
Yes Japan is very different from China if not most of Asia. It's also not hard to see that Japan probably adopted the naming order since they also adopted the Chinese writing system.
I'm Chinese. I was born in Asia and I still routinely visit and keep in touch with my family over there.
To be clear, I'm not saying every Chinese person in China is like this, nor am I saying that it will always be like this. Looking at both HK and Taiwan, things will eventually change for the better in the long term; especially when you consider the long term effects of the one child policy. However (speaking to fellow Chinese people) what I'm describing is real and there's no use in ignoring it, and I feel that there's value in helping people, who aren't of Asian, Hispanic, or Mediterranean (Italian, Greek, etc...) background; to understand it.
The family name lineage is definitely important in Japan as well. Just look at all the Japanese companies named after their founder's family names e.g. Toyota (Toyoda), Mazda (Matsuda), Honda. Also, their main form of religion, Shinto, is basically the worship of ancestors.
One reaction people might have to this is 'ugh China'. Another one might be 'ugh rich people'. Article reminded me of the Brazilian banker who ran over a bunch of cyclists a few years ago.
You can find people with that mentality in any American city. Sociopaths are pretty evenly distributed across the human population. It's just that here the incentives are different. And there, money and connections are an absolute get out of jail free card.
That said, I'm surprised there isn't a greater culture of vengeance killings over issues like this.
... Committed with vehicles and which involve running the person over four times, making sure to get out of the vehicle to steer your car tire over their skull ...
Not the Chinese influence, the Communist one. That said the morality or lack of same shown by some Chinese or Vietnamese people is far closer to the historical norm for humans than that shown by individuals in societies with rule of law. In pre state societies on average 15% of men died violently and morality was something that applied to the ingroup, not the outgroup.
For further reading on this I can highly recommend Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature".
You sure that in Vietnam that there are hit-to-kill incidents?
I thought that thing is exclusive to China. Or at least like that, since I have a few people who got hit by vehicles but only injured, drivers don't even tries to finish off.
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.
One thing baffles me. If parents knew (there is security camera footage) that their child was run over several times because some asshole made a RATIONAL choice; and then said parents hired a bunch of guys to disappear the asshole, suddenly the expected penalty would change, and so would the rational choice. (There probably wouldn't be much of an investigation, either.) So why aren't they doing it? If the government can't/won't set the proper incentives for the assholes not to murder, why can't the people do it themselves? Desperate times call for desperate measures...
ADDENDUM: admittedly my comment above is emotional. Obviously not every accident ends in the driver running over the victim several times. But from the article and from some of the comments, I got an impression that these cases are not THAT unusual, and it's not just a case of a Western newspaper publishing a sensationalist Sinophobic article.
Sure, this is an extreme case but when living in china you are confronted daily to behaviours that defies our sense of moral. China should pour founds into education but they will never do as educated people would be the end of "elite controlled" china of today.
Think about it, this is a country of 1.3 billion people. How often does this actually happen?
In the Slate Plus special feature section, the author of the article shared statistics on how frequently traffic accidents result in death in China, compared with the United States. In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 deaths, compared to over two million injuries in traffic accidents. That means that, in the United States, there are 70 injuries per every traffic death. According to China's Xinhua News Agency, the ratio of traffic injuries to deaths in China is four to one.
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.
The tricky thing here is many are actually killed intentionally. And the killers escaped from that and, instead, were ruled as unintentional. Justice is missing here. That's why the whole damn calculation is valid. I know a lot more similar calculations, driver vs pedestrian, doctor vs patient, kid-robber(yes, many parents are worrying about kids being robbed in front of you, that's not a joke), the list can go on and on. I'm from China. And that's why I left. People in China always debate on wrong factors or they are just not brave enough to talk about it publicly and get used to heavily-self-sensored so that new fake self-consciousnesses take control.
I live in India. The rest of the country ratio is similar here. We have hit and run cases too, very high profile ones. Not the worst ones come back to ensure they've killed a 3 yr old!
Judging by the ease with which cops in US use deadly force 300,000,000 is also enough it seems. And ISIS is controlling how many couple of million at most - and life there is not highly valued too. It is not the population of the country, but that you know you can get away with something.
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.
Our morals aren't nearly as absolute as we like to think. 20% of the entire population of Rwanda were hacked to death with farm implements by ordinary people. 25% of the Cambodian population were butchered, starved or worked to death by a poorly-organised militia.
Any of us have the capacity to kill if we have a sufficiently compelling justification. Ask any mother if she would kill to save her children. The difference between murder and self defence is mere context - the Nazis believed that they were defending themselves from a Jewish conspiracy, the Interahamwe believed they were liberating themselves from Tutsi oppression.
Consider the fact that the rate of domestic homicide in the US is drastically higher in households that own a gun. A great number of Americans have killed their partner simply because the means to do so easily was readily available. Evil or insanity is not a prerequisite for murder, only means, motive and opportunity.
In the study, he didn't ask his subjects to kill. And they didn't actually murder anyone.
> Rwanda ... Cambodia ... Nazis ... Interahamwe
People killing on behalf of the State is a whole other matter than what the article is talking about vis-à-vis pedestrian fatalities. The State has been the largest single driver of misery, destruction, and death in human history, and I don't disagree that mass murder has happened and is evil. But drivers ensuring the death of a struck passenger stands in stark contrast to the kill-or-be-killed nature of State violence. On this point, I would agree with your assertion about "compelling justification," which in the case of the State is the threat of violence against the killer for not doing the bidding of the State.
But even in the face of multiple genocides and huge wars, including nuclear bomb blasts, the fact remains that the vast majority of humans have never and will never kill another human.
> A great number of Americans ...
See a sibling response for murder rates and compare to my assertion that a vast majority of people don't do it.
And self-defense is not murder by the legal definition, which include premeditation.
While I think murder is a bit outside the in-built nature of human beings, I absolutely believe that violence in general is one of the core human behaviors. People resort to violence very often, and very quickly. Sure, there's incentive to get the other guy or girl to back down without expending the energy of physically attacking them, but I'm not limiting my definition of violence to only be physical. Psychological violence is half of the infantry's job, anyways. I also offer another[0] interesting story about this fact (that most humans will not voluntarily murder another human being).
The book Guns, germs and steel retorts that fit the majority of human history (I.e the last hundred thousand years or so) most human encounters with other humans who were not family resulted in death for one party or another. Still the case in some isolated areas. Only the growth of societies really changed that default inclination, out of necessity.
The book is based on research that was flat made up by S.L.A. Marshall. There is no evidence he ever collected the data he used to spread that myth.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman
Quote From Wikipedia
The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception,[1] the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldiers' firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.[2]
This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
> The vast majority of people have never and will never murder.
Like I said, modern society has instilled feelings of guilt and negative consequences with our comparatively well-developed ethical and justice systems, generally leading to situations where the risk of getting caught murdering someone outweighs the benefits of killing them (go to jail, hell, etc). But flip the risk analysis (eg, what this article is about), et voilà, no problem.
Did I restrict my statement in some way when I said "vast majority"?
I know citing Wikipedia is lazy, but it mentions high murder rates of 35 in 100,000 during medieval times. I know there are other forms of homicide, but I haven't spent the time to find stats. Assuming on average one murderer per victim, %0.00035 is vansishingly small.
In this context, medieval times are "modern society". They already had social, religious and legal norms against killing. Also, most people lived in the countryside or small villages where they didn't have many chances for killing people anyway, so the murder rate in larger towns must be a lot higher than the overall 35 figure.
Every last one of us can kill. Second by second our minds overrule our instincts and our emotions because we're smart and we can think and we're very social animals that care about shame and what others think of us and what we've been told and the consequences of our actions, but every last one of us has a stone cold killer threaded inseparably.
I am an enormous believer in good manners [1].
[1] Which I am much better at in meatspace. Damn you, anonymous internet.
600 people killed in 30 years in battle between the featured tribes. Population of New Guinea: 11.3 million.
Some of the battles are agreed upon ahead of time. Killing in battle is not usually considered murder under law, but even so, the vast majority of people do not murder.
The armed militia was also high on drugs when they confronted the motorists, so their very minds (nature) were changed during the encounter.
It's not human nature, even the etymology and history for the word "assassin"(hashish eater) says it, in most of the cases humans have needed drugs to bypass his default nature and kill another human.
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.
> Even if you account for under-reporting in China, we have a more violent society.
This article is about the casual murder of toddlers and preschoolers with little serious consequence by strangers. I don't think we're accounting for under-reporting enough here.
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.
15000? Wow, This is like 3 times more expensive than the "let's forget all about your father killed by our drone by stoopid mistake and take this nice goat" happy tax.
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 may down vote because most of us won't venture out to the streets, but we have to realize that though this is hard this is the sad truth.
think about the people would work more than you would because they have feed their family. We may think it's insane hours/task of high risk but they do. It's not like their genes are programmed to make the work crazy but they have to for survival.
I don't mean to support the acts mentioned in the article, but this is what would happen if a person is pushed to the extreme and the person has means to come out of it. Mostly money, power, influence.
How can this be stopped ? I don't have answer but happy to discuss.
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.
Not the best source, but this is common knowledge in many circles:
"In a squad of 10 men, on average fewer than three ever fired their weapons in combat. Day in, day out — it did not matter how long they had been soldiers, how many months of combat they had seen, or even that the enemy was about to overrun their position. This was what the highly regarded Brigadier General Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, better known as S.L.A. Marshall, or ‘Slam,’ concluded in a series of military journal articles and in his book, Men Against Fire, about America’s World War II soldiers. "
And:
"This was a problem for the US military and its allies during World War II. New training implements were developed and hit rates improved. The changes were small, but effective."
(playing the devil's advocate) You did note the issues with your sources, but another issue here is both seem to reference western societies, which are guilt[0] societies while asian cultures in general are shame[1] based. This can imply differences in individual morals in people in these cultures.
How does the intentional murder of innocents not cause public/societal shame though? The article mentions such murders have caused outrage, so while some may get off lightly in court it would surely bring shame to the person who committed the act.
S.L.A. Marshall made up his figures from whole cloth. There's no evidence he ever did the research he claimed to have done upon which those figures are based.
Below quote from http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha....
Emphasis not in original
This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
My comment was more about your use of the word "instinct" than the fact that soldiers normally dislike killing. It would not be surprising that some countries have different reactions to killing if this was indeed a moral construct and not an "instinct."
Same thing with the Wikipedia article you link that uses the word "instinct" without justifying it (do we see that in ALL cultures, in babies?)
Interesting. I would suspect that a great amount of the resistance to moving to autonomous warfare (not drone warfare, but weaponry where no human pulls trigger) is by these same soldiers; not so much a matter of being put out of a job, as no longer being able to be the "conscientious objector on the firing line."
In response to below, many large animals have instincts about not killing their own kind. It is either too physically dangerous (a similarly-sized opponent) or in the case of social animals too socially costly, depriving the group of a member that represents significant investment. Wolves and lions will kill each other, but never casually.
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...
Is there really a situation in which the punishment for killing is lighter than for wounding, especially with a weapon/vehicle?? Or are you speaking less formally: that you might never get caught for the kill if there's nobody to turn you in?
> Is there really a situation in which the punishment for killing is lighter than for wounding, especially with a weapon/vehicle?
Yes.
If someone breaks into your home, in most states self defense would be a slam-dunk defense against a murder charge. Even if acquited of murder, the burglar's family can sue you for wrongful death - the evidentiary bar for wrongful death is much lower than for murder.
It's entirely possible to be acquited of murder, but convicted in civil court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a burglar's family.
Not to mention the fact that in a criminal trial, if the guy is dead he doesn't testify against you.
In situations in which it is legal for you to employ deadly force, you won't be convicted of any criminal statute if you apply that force or any lesser force. That is, if you have an adequate reason to shoot to kill, a application of force which results in a wound is treated equally with one which results in death. The reverse, obviously, is not true.
In all cases, you may be sued civilly for a wrongful death, battery, or any number of other things. And lots of parties can bring the suit: the individual himself, various members of his family, your homeowners association, etc. N is fairly big, removing one of the N probably is not meaningful. Do these sort of civil suits tend to pay more for woundings than deaths? I have no data on this but would be surprised if that were the case.
I expect the only thing the OP meant is that slain person cannot testify the killer. This is self-evident but not really helpful. How is it different than "if you're going to rob someone, you should also kill them". I suppose this might be good practical, tactical advice for criminals but it isn't advancing the discussion here.
> If someone breaks into your home, in most states self defense would be a slam-dunk defense against a murder charge. Even if acquited of murder, the burglar's family can sue you for wrongful death - the evidentiary bar for wrongful death is much lower than for murder.
In some states you will be immune from civil action if you win your criminal case on self defense. Florida, for example [1].
If no criminal case is brought in Florida, and you are sued civilly and prove self defense in the civil trial, the court is required to award you attorney fees, court costs, compensation for loss of income, and expenses incurred for your defense.
one example that come to mind is Trayvon Martin's case [1] ... since he died, he could not say that the shooter was not acting in self defense... no jail time for the shooter.
