China’s response to bad driving: shrug your shoulders and look to the gods

Earlier (last month?) I had blogged about the inherent dangers in crossing a street in China (to say nothing of navigating it by car). The seeming lawlessness of drivers, the diverse nature of motorized and pedaled vehicles, the crowds, the trucks and carts tilting with heaped, unbalanced cargo –all this produces a state of anarchy and chaos and a feeling of complete panic for anyone who finds herself in the middle of it.

Perhaps, then, I should not have been surprised that somewhere on a rural road in China a traffic death occurred (read about it here) when a wealthy woman, Su Xiuwen, ran over a peasant woman last October. The Times describes the incident thus: “Mrs. Su was driving her BMW when a farmer transporting his onion cart to market bumped the luxury sedan. Mrs. Su became enraged, hit the farmer, then revved her car and plunged into the crowd. The farmer's wife, Liu Zhongxia, was killed.”

The case sparked great controversy precisely because Mrs. Su was both wealthy and well connected (it’s commonly referred to as the BMW case). When the local judge ruled that the death was a traffic accident based on negligence and gave Mrs. Su a two-year suspended sentence, the public reacted instantly by alleging corruption and bribery. In an unprecedented move to quell these rumors, a special judicial panel was called to review the lower court ruling.

Today the panel came down with a verdict. It upheld the lower court’s finding of no corruption and stated that Mrs. Su did not intend to kill Mrs. Liu: she was simply a bad driver.

It is, possibly, the correct result. After all, this could have been an instance of reverse prejudice: her wealth lead people to think that of course it couldn’t have been JUST an accident (in the same way that people have speculated whether Laura Bush’s youthful driving ‘mishap,’ also resulting in a traffic death, was treated differently because of her family’s prominence in the community).

To me, what was notable in the case was the court’s tolerance for “bad driving,” as it indeed seems to excuse virtually anything that can occur on the road (short of intentional homicide through use of a vehicle). Couldn’t you say that every instance of crazy disregard for road rules is simply “bad driving?” The whole nation suffers from a case of bad driving. Perhaps the reaction of “wadda ya gonna do about it..” is not a good way to get the country to focus on road safety.