The video is shocking from any angle. A young girl’s head emerges helplessly from underneath the wrecked bus. But the three-year-old wouldn’t lay stuck for very long: an army of onlookers and rescuers came to her aid.
The incident transpired early Wednesday morning when a bus driver in Laiyang in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong lost control of his bus and careened onto a sidewalk. The young girl, evidently standing right in its path, was knocked down and pinned underneath the bus’s shattered front.
By the time an onlooker turned on a camera, dozens of bystanders rushed to her rescue. An emergency worker frantically dug the girl to safety with a shovel. An onlooker held her head straight, protecting her from the shovel’s blade with a hard hat. Their efforts attracted profuse praise after the harrowing scene hit the Internet. “There are more and more ordinary citizen heroes,” one commenter wrote on Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
Wednesday’s rescue stands in stark contrast to a similar case almost exactly a year ago. Two-year old Wang Yue, who came to be known by her nickname Yue Yue (yue translates to happy), was playing in a market in Foshan in southern China, when she was run over by two vans consecutively in the double hit-and-run accident. Surveillance video showed eighteen people indifferently walking and cycling past, ignoring the injured, helpless girl, who later passed away from her injuries. The footage shocked Chinese society and started a debate about how much a sense of community has been lost in China’s rapid-paced economic development. Chen Xianmei, a then 57-year old scrap peddler, helped the dying child and has since been showered with recognition.
This air of indifference from bystanders stems from a legal case from 2006. Then, a 65-year old woman named Xu Shoulan was taken to a hospital by 26-year Peng Yu after breaking her hip while boarding a bus. She later sued the Yu for damages claiming that he had pushed her in the first place. Peng insisted he helped her out of compassion and had nothing to do with her fall. The court didn’t trust the samaritan’s assurances and order Peng to pay damages. Fortunately such fears weren’t on the line this time, and the three-year-old girl was successfully rescued.