Beijing's Mean Streets

At dinner Sunday night, two filmmakers passing through Beijing tell a shocking story: They had witnessed a woman collapse as she crossed an intersection. Nobody came to her aid.

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At dinner Sunday night, two filmmakers passing through Beijing tell a shocking story: They had witnessed a woman collapse as she crossed an intersection. Nobody came to her aid. They were helpless on the opposite side of a vast Beijing street, separated by hurtling traffic. Eventually the woman recovered consciousness, dusted herself off, and hobbled away.

This anecdote triggered a "that's nothing" "I can top that" anecdote from an American at the top with long experience in China. One of his employees had been bicycling to work one morning. She was clipped from behind by a motor scooter and knocked to the ground. As she fell, she broke her wrist. The motorcyclist did not stop. Pedestrians stepped over her. She arrived at work a few minutes late, told nobody what had happened, and tried to do her job until the Americans in the office noticed her pain and took her to a hospital.

I've seen nothing so dramatic myself, but everywhere here you are surrounded by a willed cluelessness that - in the American context - gives rise to the stereotypes about Asian driving. I'm in the middle of a retail transaction - literally waiting for my change - and an elderly woman will shove herself in front of me to try to hand cash to the clerk. You stand against a wall in a hotel corridor and other walkers will crash into you from before and behind. And on the roads! I was nearly entangled in a high-speed freeway collision on my route home from the Great Wall when a car in the right lane of a Beijing superhighway with no traffic in front of it suddenly decelerated for mysterious reasons of its own from 60 to 20 mph. The car traveling behind the decelerating car then nipped into our car in the middle lane with no signal, no warning, and only about 6 feet distance. We then had to decelerate - and were nearly struck from behind. And so on.

I've heard three plausible explanations of the willed cluelessness.

1) Blame crowding. This is a very populous country, and even a comparatively sprawling city like Beijing feels packed to overflowing by its 17 million people. If you pause to allow people to proceed you - or to complete their transactions - or to enter your lane - you will be stuck forever. If you turn aside to act the Good Samaritan, you will be tending to casualties forever. To survive, you learn to point your nose in the direction in which you wish to go, and charge, leaving others to find their way as best they can.

2) Blame Confucius. People in Confucian societies are raised to accept huge and heavy responsibilities toward people to whom they owe duty: children to parents, wives to husbands, students to teachers. They cope by shedding any sense of responsibility to people to whom they owe no duty: the motorist ahead of them, the stricken pedestrian underneath their feet.

3) Blame communism. Communism abolished the sense of private space - and displaced individuals from any public responsibility. Not only were elder Chinese crammed into communal housing, but they also learned that to raise your voice when a neighbor was victimized was to risk being labeled a class enemy yourself. It is the survivors of that system who then raised today's unyielding pedestrians and aggressive motorists. The compassionate and public-spirited were all killed two generations ago.