China Flash: Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

We’re in the Russian quarter of Beijing, close by the stone walkways, pagodas and manicured firs of Ritan Park. The shop signs are in Mandarin and Russian, there are two notorious nightclubs, Maggie’s and Chocolate: dwarf strippers in one, Uzbek prostitutes in the other, gold toilets and leopard print in both.

There’s a row of huge, dark boutiques selling fur coats and, out on the road, a line of stalled traffic. A man has leapt off his scooter and is verbally abusing the woman in the car behind him. Everyone’s stopped to watch in silence. My colleagues and I didn’t see the incident itself, we can only see the man squaring up to the driver’s side of the car and screaming at the woman, who at first answers back and then winds up her window and waits it out. The man continues to call her every womanhating term he can think of – and the words are so ready in his mind he doesn’t need to stop and think – until another man intervenes and tries to talk him down. Nobody else does anything.

I ask my colleagues about it later. This is what I get:

“In China there isn’t a culture of helping other people. People are afraid to help in case it comes back on them. Have you heard of the ‘porcelain doll’ case? It might be an urban myth but it says something true about Chinese society. An elderly woman fell over in the street and a man helped her. He took her to the hospital, waited with her until her family got there, gave her 200 RMB to tide her over. And when the family arrived, the woman put it all on him. She said, ‘I’m like a porcelain doll, if you knock me, I break everywhere.’ When the police got there, they sided with the woman. They said to the man, ‘Why would you go all the way to the hospital with this woman you don’t even know, unless you’d caused the injury?’”

“There are cases of people faking or setting up accidents or lying in the road pretending they’ve been knocked over so they can get some money out of someone. So people are cautious about helping others for that reason. Tere’s no concept of being a good Samaritan. You know those tin cans that’re really dangerous [a motorbike with a long seat at the back and tin walls and roof, used for short trips by locals with a death wish]? I saw one hit a woman in the street, she fell over, shopping went everywhere. The guy just drove off. He saw what he’d done. But I couldn’t walk past without helping, so I helped, even though I knew what could happen. Luckily she was thankful and it didn’t come back on me.”

“In China, in the cities, you decide the law between yourselves. If there’s a road accident, both parties wait, the policeman arrives, takes a look, asks people what happened, looks around and says, ‘Well, it looks like it’s that guy’s fault.’ And the guy whose fault it is has to pay the other one a certain amount of money which the policeman decides. It doesn’t go near a court. It doesn’t go near a lawyer. It doesn’t go on anyone’s record.”

“This happened to a friend of mine, an expat guy. He got into a car accident with another driver. They both pulled to the side of the road, both got out, had words. The other guy, who was Chinese, pushed him a couple of times. And my friend smacked him in the face, gave him a bloody nose. So then they both wait around for the police officer to come. And while they were waiting, the guy who’d been punched was getting the blood out of his nose and smearing it all over his chest and his T-shirt to make it look like the punch was worse than it was. And when the police officer arrived, he asked them what had happened and my friend admitted, ‘Yeah, I did throw the first punch. That was me.’ And the police officer said, ‘Right… well I reckon you owe the guy….2,500 RMB?’ And they all agreed, so he had to pay up. He thought two and a half grand per punch was reasonable. Maybe he could throw down some money in advance next time he wants to hit a guy.”


Further reading in the China Flash series:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Beijing Night
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law
• Beijing storms, turtles and dogs
• Two Chinese characters
• Hair envy