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21 October 2011

Typical Chinese Drivers

I have said it before and I will probably say it again and again until I am killed by some functionally retarded drunkard; Chinese drivers are assholes.

The one about my student in an "accident".
The one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The other one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The other one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The one about lazy Chinese police.

If you live anywhere in the Chinese-speaking world you have likely heard about Yueyue, a two-year-old girl who was hit by two different cars and left for dead on the streets of 佛山市 in central 广东. While her mother was shopping, the national pastime in China, she wandered about aimlessly in the street. This is not at all unusual. I regularly see unattended children of all ages blocking traffic. The more I think about it the more I have to correct an earlier statement. Blocking traffic is the national pastime in China.

While Yueyue was amusing herself with the aforementioned wandering about, a van hit her in broad daylight. It was 5:30pm but there was still more than ample light and this particular part of the street was under an awning of sorts with lights. Almost like Freemont Street in Las Vegas, but a thousand times shittier. Think of it as a covered, and lit, pedestrian mall with cars driving through. The unusual part is that it is covered, not that cars drive through.

The first driver claims that he never saw her. That is probably true. Chinese drivers rarely see the people and things they slam into. But the driver stopped after hitting the child, paused briefly and then continued driving over the rest of her. He knew he hit something. He simply did not care what it was.

What comes next is what seems to shock most people. Running over a child when there are no visible obstructions is apparently not all that shocking to the Chinese. After Yueyue is run over, several people walk by as though a dying child bleeding in the street is a common occurence. And it probably is. I have seen the way these people drive. I have read several reports that say that an average of 300,000 people are killed in traffic “accidents” every year in China. I have to assume that more than a few of those people are children.

After the two-year-old is run down and after several people walk by without giving two shits, a small truck runs over her dying body as if she was just another garbage bag in the road. In all fairness to these assholes, one cannot drive more than five minutes without encountering a garbage bag in the road. I have hit one or two myself. But in all fairness to me, I actually stopped. The second driver, being as blind, suicidal and/or functionally retarded as most Chinese drivers, may very well have assumed that the crunching body under his tires was indeed someone’s discarded goat heads. But the people who walked by could clearly see that this particular garbage bag was actually a small child bleeding to death.

Eighteen people, and I use that word loosely, walked, bicycled or scootered by the dying child and did not do a single thing to help in any way whatsoever. One scooter monkey stopped and looked back, but quickly drove away. I guess it was not his child, so why give a shit. Several people looked at her dying body and went about their business. One jackass was walking directly toward her and had to drastically alter his trajectory to avoid stepping in her pool of blood. As soon as the annoying little obstacle was cleared, he turned back onto his original path.

These people clearly saw her. It was not dark. It was not raining. The street was well-lit. Chinese people are generally oblivious to anyone and anything around them, but to not see a small child lying in a pool of blood literally in the middle of the street is an extreme level of oblivious far and away from the common knocking down old ladies to be the first in line. And by line I mean mass of people crowding together and all screaming at the clerk at once.

Eventually an old lady collecting garbage from the street dragged Yueyue away and prevented a third truck from running over her. I have often said that these old people who rummage through the garbage looking for recyclable material provide a valuable service. Without them the street garbage would simply pile endlessly higher. Millions of tons of trash that could be recycled would otherwise fill more holes in the ground. They also seem to be the only Chinese people willing to keep small children from being pounded into roadkill.

Yueyue is currently listed as anything from critical to brain dead. Different news agencies disagree.

About half of my drive home every night is on a street with no street lights and little to no houses or shops. The only light in front of me is from my own headlights, the headlights of the cars that almost hit me in their endless quest to always be first all the time regardless of how much slower they are going (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), the headlights of the cars driving on the wrong side of the road and coming directly toward me (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), and the occasional full moon. Weather permitting. More often than not there is no visible moonlight.

But I can see every dog that runs in front of me, every child wearing dark clothes and riding a dark bicycle, every scooter driving perpendicular to the road, and every single one of the 68,000 potholes in the road. It seems that the only things I can never see in time are the black garbage bags (I can spot the pink ones) and the orange traffic cones that have turned black with dirt and apathy. I would see a bleeding two-year-old. And if I could see her while dodging every car, van, giant truck carrying a precariously stacked load, blue truck, taxi, bus, scooter, bicycle, ox cart, tractor, those weird battle bot trucks that look like something out of a low-budget straight to Beta movie about an oppressively dystopian future society, then someone walking by her on the street who cannot see her has no business walking without a white cane.

Unfortunately, the only reason people are talking about this particular two-year-old victim of a horribly selfish culture is because it was all captured by a surveillance camera. Ordinarily, when the Chinese run over the Chinese they simply drive away. If they stop for some strange reason or if, even stranger, the police who make Clancy Wiggum look like Tony Baretta bother to get off their corrupt, lazy asses and do their job that month and find the driver, they have to pay the medical expenses for the person they almost killed. There are also a wide variety of fines available, based on the victim’s gender, age, occupation and importance. There is a flowchart that makes determining the fine pretty simple. If the person who was hit dies, the driver does not have to pay the medical bill.

In Yueyue’s case, every second was captured on tape. This has brought cries of moral outrage, nationwide soul-searching, actual arrests for horrible driving, endless comments on websites, and what I am typing right now. What bothers me the most is that only now are people talking about this. Actually what bothers me the most is that when I watched the video of this two-year-old being run over by two vehicles, I was not horrified, shocked, disturbed, angry, in disbelief, aghast or agog. I simply nodded my head to myself and said, to myself, “Yeah. That’s how they drive.”

I find it horribly hypocritical of the Chinese to feign outrage over something that they never gave a flying fuck about before. Chinese drivers have been driving like Helen Keller on meth since Henry Ford invented slave labor. It never bothered them until people in other countries could see on Youtube how horribly selfish the Chinese are. Most Chinese are apathetically unaware that any of their actions will ever have consequences. If something bad happens, it is not because of the horribly selfish thing they did. It was simply an unlucky day.

Soul-searching is a moot point in a nation that has no soul. I do not mean this in a religious way. Baby Jesus and I are not exactly on each other’s Twitter rolodex. They probably call it something hipper than a rolodex, but that is clearly not the most relevant misuse of pop culture here today. The Chinese invented a few good things in the past, and they were probably a decent people once, but from what I have seen in the present they are soulless automatons who desire nothing more than money, terrible television programs and have a violently strong urge to be in the exact space that I am taking at any given moment.

Arresting people only for crimes committed in front of surveillance cameras seems like a bad idea to me, but since there will one day be at least one camera pointed at each and every person at all times, it will eventually work itself out. Arresting people for lawless driving in a country where any and all laws pertaining to driving are constantly ignored probably only confuses those arrested. How can it be bad today to do what has always been socially acceptable. When you have watched the police sit idly by while people do the most batshit stupid things humanly possible, there is no reason to assume that the police will ever do their jobs.

The two drivers who ran over Yueyue have been arrested. They probably have no idea why. Surely, having an unlucky day cannot be illegal. Some of the passersby have publicly said that they never saw her. The surveillance footage clearly shows them looking right at her. But letting a small child die in the street is not illegal.

The comments on the information superhighway are mostly hilarious. Many are in Chinese, and illiterate Chinese is so much funnier than illiterate English. English comments by Chinese speakers can be amusing at times, but after seeing so much Chinglish, if you will, over the course of so many years, it loses much of its novelty.

It has been said that we, the rest of the world, cannot judge the entire Chinese culture on a single isolated incident. I would ordinarily agree. In fact, if this were the only time that Chinese drivers have driven like functionally retarded drunkards then I would say that, overall, they are doing pretty well. But I judge the entire Chinese culture on innumerable incidents. Many I have witnessed. More than a few I was lucky enough to experience firsthand. Some I recorded on the camera in my car.

When you buy a car here, some of the standard options include air conditioning (a requirement), a CD player (ours is a piece of shit), and a camera that records everything in front of the car while driving. This feature is fairly common because so many people run into so many people that one cannot count on any police officers at the scene to do, frankly, anything. What people are most concerned with in any collision is fault. Since it is always the other person’s fault, a camera on your dashboard takes away a lot of the fines issued by government offices that base their decisions on gender, age, occupation and importance.

When we first got our camera I thought it might be amusing to show my loyal reader some of the batshit stupid things I see every day. I have talked about horribly selfish Chinese drivers once or twice. I thought it might be nice to show them. But the problem is that I, and the camera, see batshit stupid things every day. The amount of information is simply overwhelming. If I went through everything every day I could post each day’s highlights here, but it should be obvious to anyone paying any attention that this website is not something I consider on a daily basis. And the camera automatically divides everything into two-minute files. Each file is about 80mb. That is simply too much to upload. And the pictures look like they were taken from a cheap Chinese car camera.

Not too long ago our cheap Chinese car camera recorded a scooter monkey taking a dive while driving over 80km/h. This is only 30% above the speed limit. In other words, average. He was in front of me and there was no one between us, so I got a clear shot. I ran over his helmet. His head was not in it. Fortunately for both of us, these helmets are cheap Chinese pieces of crap.

After turning his helmet into tiny bits of trash that will be in the road for weeks to come, I stopped. I am such a foreigner. The cars around us used the fallen scooter and my stopping as an opening to speed their way in front of everyone else. That is the most important thing. It still intrigues me how much everyone always wants to be first. Including and especially those going the slowest. At the very least four other drivers and maybe a dozen scooter monkeys saw this guy go down. I was the only person who stopped.

Here is the best part. This would be the punch line if any of this were a joke. I stopped after I ran over a cheap scooter helmet in poor visibility in the driving rain where there was no camera but my own. At least twenty people passed or ran over the two-year-old girl in the infamous footage that clearly shows good visibility, no rain and plenty of light where the presence of a surveillance camera should be common knowledge.

I am not the nicest person in the world. I do not generally like to be around most people. If I were Henry Bemis it would not be tragically ironic since I do not wear glasses. But even I showed more compassion for some dipshit scooter monkey, exactly the kind of horribly inept driver that I regularly deride, than any of these Chinese people showed for an innocent little girl.

While looking for footage with the least commentary I found a Chinese article about an American tourist in China who jumped into a lake to save a Chinese woman who was drowning. The article, written by a Chinese writer, said that “only a foreigner would dare such a rescue”.



This video is fairly graphic and ends with a typical
“how do you feel” interview with the parents.



This video is less graphic
but shows the same attitude.



This video is far less graphic and contains no death,
but it illustrates my point beautifully.



These are compilation videos of Chinese drivers
slamming into each other.




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