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.
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.
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.
That said, I'm surprised there isn't a greater culture of vengeance killings over issues like this.
For further reading on this I can highly recommend Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
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.
No wonder Vietnam have that similarity since they have been influenced by China for 1000 year.
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.
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.
The few cases mentioned where something happened to the driver were probably the exceptions where the victim also had money.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers...
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]
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.
That's just one example and it isn't exclusive to primates.
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.
I am an enormous believer in good manners [1].
[1] Which I am much better at in meatspace. Damn you, anonymous internet.
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.
Putting aside the statement's low plausibility of truth, it is certainly the worst thing I've read in quite some time.
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...
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
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.
And it's not just toddlers and preschoolers. It's all pedestrians, even old people.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
This can be seen everywhere, if we open our eyes and look. similar thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jgy0b/e...
This just seems like a logical progression of cars in the US to cars in China.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong you think someone is.
The majority of consumers don't even see the cow, much less kill it themselves.
citation needed
I don't think this is "human instinct". Looks more like a moral construct.
"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. "
http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-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."
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.
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?)
What about the previous quarter million years of modern humans killing other humans?
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.
"Dead men don't sue" is a thing.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...