China is a country home to curious traditions but a strange practice has come to our notice, that of mauling a pedestrian one may have hit, just to make sure they are absolutely and completely dead. Not just hanging in between.
In our country a pedestrian who is accidentally hit by a driver, would normally expect an apology, an audacious rant about keeping their eyes open or in most cases the one who hits speeds off and away. Few good souls stop and help too. But the Chinese seem to have redefined normal.
Spine chilling incidents
While many such cases are recorded on CCTV cameras and are considered as accidents and not murder. In one such accident a BMW hit a two-year-old girl, and when her grandmother shouted at the driver, the driver reversed the car over the child and ran over her again, to kill her for good.
A license to kill?
Although no justification for such inhuman acts can be offered, people in China do have a reason for this. Apart from an ancient saying that reads “it is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure”, the compensation policies in Chinese laws encourage this practice.
If a person injures someone in an accident, they have to pay compensation for the rest of the victim’s life, while the compensation is a one time affair in event of the victim’s death. So drivers simply opt for the option which clearly appears to be more economic to them, seemingly oblivious of the sheer brutality of their actions.
Defiant drivers despite legal changes
Despite laws in China and Taiwan being changed to consider such so called “accidents”, as murders, most drivers have remained defiant. During the trial such drivers simply say they mistook the victim for a non living object.
This explains how two lakh people die due to ‘road accidents’ in China every year.