Video footage of a two-year-old Chinese girl hit by a van and passers-by ignoring the child has sparked outrage in China.

The incident happened on Oct 13 in a narrow alley in Foshan City, Guangzhou Province. Video surveillance footage which was posted in Chinese video sharing site Youku showed the girl, identified as Yueyue, hit by a van. The truck's driver stopped briefly, but drove away and crushed Yueyue for the second time with his rear wheels.

For about seven minutes, 18 passers-by and cyclists went by and ignored the injured girl. A second vehicle hit Yueyue again before a woman pulled the child to the side of the road and Yueyue's mother appears.

According to reports, Yueyue wandered from her house located 100 metres away from the scene of the accident.

The apathy of those who saw the child bleeding but chose to look the other way sparked outrage in China.

"Really, what is up with our society? I saw this and my heart went cold. Everyone needs to do some soul searching about ending this kind of indifference," Reuters quoted a blogger on Web site Sina Weibo.

"Find those 18 passers-by, dissect their brains and see what medicine the Communist Party has been feeding us to make them like the walking dead," The Australian quoted another blogger.

One possible explanation for the behaviour of the Chinese pedestrians is high-profile lawsuits against good Samaritans who were even ordered to pay large fines to people they assisted.

In September, the Ministry of Health even cautioned the public not to rush to assist older people if they fall. Chinese obviously heeded the ministry's advice.

Reports said that the 57-year-old rag collector who helped the child was told several times to mind her own business. Even the doctor who declared Yueyue brain dead told her parents in a phone call that had he been the one to hit the girl, he would also have fled the accident scene.

Both drivers have been arrested. One of them even justified his running over Yueyue because if the girl died he would only pay a fine of $3,200 (20,000 yuan), but had she survived and suffered injuries he would have to pay thousands of yuan.

"Humans beget humans, devils beget devils. China gave birth to this f***ing society," another blogger on Sina Weibo wrote.

The video has more than one million hits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CrCoRu4EWo&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fresults%3Fsearch_query%3Dhuman%2Bmisbehavior%2Bghuangzhou%26aq%3Df&has_verified=1

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