It is not good to be pedestrian in China. In case of accident, drivers actually prefer to finish off the pedestrians rather than help them.
A succession of tragedies
Last April, an unlicensed driver in the Guangdong province hit a 2 year old in front of her grandmother. The woman driver then ran over the little girl twice before getting out of the car. She then tried to bribe the grandmother to keep quiet about the incident.
The event is far from exceptional, in fact it is rather common, to the point that the Chinese now have an expression for this practice: “It is better to hit and kill than to hit and harm.”
Pragmatic murders …
These cold-blooded killings meet a very matter-of-fact view of Chinese law: it costs much more to care for of a person than his burial.
Compensation for the victims’ families in case of death averages at around £25,000. However, if the person is hospitalized after the accident, it will cost the reckless driver much money.
Getting off lightly
Money is not the only motivation of bad drivers: lenient sentences also play a role in their drastic decisions. Since 2008, a succession of trials were held against dangerous drivers and unless the incident resulted in death, the drivers pretended to have confused the victim with debris, cardboard or rubbish bags.
The proliferation of surveillance cameras in China allows for fairly precise ideas of how these tragedies occurred. Yet even where evidence is clear, most reckless drivers take more lenient sentences for “negligence”. In one of the most shocking cases, the driver of a truck mowed down on a little boy who fortunately had just been dazed and stood up. The police then said that the child had never been hit by the truck, despite multiple testimonies verifying to the contrary.
Fortunately, all drivers do not come off as lightly as Chinese laws are being put in place to try to stem the tide of crime. However, next time you’re strolling in China, take a taxi, it’s safer!