Guess Why Drivers Try To Kill, Rather Than Injure Pedestrians in China?

by Keith Farrell

If you hit a pedestrian with your car, what would you reaction be? Most people would be horrified. In China, however, a common reaction is to throw the car in reverse and back over the person again to make sure they’re dead. Sound too horrific to be true? It’s not.

In fact, it’s such a common occurrence in China, you can watch videos from security cameras where drivers repeatedly drive over pedestrians to ensure they’re dead.

The unimaginably callous behavior was reported in blood curdling detail by Slate’s Geoffrey Sant:

In April a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time. When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”

Apparently such killings are common enough that the Chinese language has an adage for them: “It’s better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.” The reasoning stems from a set of laws which provide offenders with the perverse incentive to kill.

In China, if you hit and injure someone, you can be made liable to pay for that person’s care for the remainder of their life. However, if you kill someone with your vehicle, you only have to pay for the burial fee. So if you were to kill someone with your car, when all was said and done you could get away with paying around $30,000-$50,000. However, a lifetime of disabled care could cost millions of dollars in comparison.

Bizarre as it is, the law provides millions of dollars in incentive for Chinese drivers to kill whomever they’ve hit while driving. Killing is just more economical.

In this video, taken in 2010, a man reverses his BMW and runs a 3-year-old child over. He then puts the car in drive, runs over the child again, before he then gets out, with the car in reverse, and walks his luxury vehicle over the boy’s crushed body yet again. He then gets back in his car, seemingly unfazed, and drives away. He was only charged with accidental death, having claimed that he mistook the boy’s body for a trash bag.

Sant reported for Slate that most drivers do not fear murder charges for such actions, they know they can easily bribe witnesses or feign ignorance. He went on to detail several more appalling incidents where drivers coldly killed those they had hit with their cars, typically without legal repercussions.

While China and Taiwan have passed laws attempting to curb such atrocious behavior, the phenomenon remains. It serves as a morbid reminder of the unintended consequences of government action. By restricting individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits on behalf of the dead, and by limiting the liability incurred by drivers who cause accidental deaths, the law ceased to protect and instead provided incentive for drivers to kill.

Some have mused that Chinese culture combined with the nation’s overpopulation problems have diminished their value of human life. But regardless of any cultural differences, if you had to choose between paying millions of dollars for the rest of your life or simply putting the car in reverse and stepping on the gas again, which would you choose?

Hopefully our morality would preclude us from doing the latter, but with millions of dollars hanging over someone’s head, they might opt for the former.