David's Big Adventure in China

This is a post that I wrote in June but apparently forgot to post on the blog site.

I work for the Foreign Languages College (FLC) here at Guangxi University. A few days ago there was a strange incident at FLC in which several family members of a former student brought the young man’s body to FLC and placed it on the floor in the lobby area. Apparently the story is that the young man was a student back in 2010 but left the school after an incident in which he was accused of stealing by other students and beaten by them. Apparently the student and his family filed a lawsuit related to the incident against the university which was unsuccessful. He may have been having mental health issues before and/or after the incident. There are practically no mental health resources here at the university despite there being more than 30,000 students on campus. Mental health care here in China is generally shunned. The young man was in his hometown and apparently committed suicide. The next day his family brought his body to FLC and placed it in the lobby apparently blaming the university for his death as a result of his troubles on campus several years ago. The family supposedly refused to leave and many armed police arrived and took them away and placed them in administrative detention.

There is a strong blame culture in China that whenever a mistake is made or something bad happens there must be someone to blame. Often this blame is related to seeking compensation and I imagine that the family of the young man will be trying to collect compensation from the school. It is really quite amazing how logic is stretched and bent sometimes in attempts to assign blame and collect compensation. Related to this are the extremes to which people or organizations sometimes go to deflect blame and responsibility. There was a case a couple years ago where a rich person driving a nice car hit and injured someone and instead of stopping and trying to help the injured person, the driver backed up and ran over the person to make sure she was dead so they couldn’t identify the driver and demand compensation. This is just an example that crazy things happen all over the world.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2015 at 8:23 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.