It is a familiar scene in many places in China, as elsewhere in the world, that a group of curious people gather around to watch whenever an accident or a fight takes place.

The spectators just gather as observers to enjoy the spectacle. But these on-lookers murmuring and even joking are often accused of selfishness and apathy. Recently, media around the country have carried many reports criticizing such spectators.

In May this year, a man with a mental disorder in Xiangtan, in Central China's Hunan Province, attempted to commit suicide and climbed to the top of a six-storey building. After the police and rescuers had managed to calm the man down, hundreds of viewers on the street below started to cry, "Jump, jump". The man finally jumped off the building after a three-hour stand-off with the police. Applause and cheers burst out from among the crowd.

Last month, China Central Television reported that last year in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, a 15-year-old girl was forced by another three girls to take off all her clothes and stand naked in public as punishment for stepping on one of the girl's feet.

The three even compelled the naked girl to parade through the streets among whistles and screams from surrounding viewers, yet no one stepped forward to stop the cruel behaviour. Four young men under the age of 18 from among the on-lookers then grabbed the scared girl, led her away and raped her.

"I was frightened," the victim told CCTV. "Yet, I was not afraid of the villains insulting me. It was the complicated expression in the viewers' eyes that scared me. It was these people who made me helpless."

In yet another incident, last month, a thief jumped into a canal in Ningbo, of East China's Zhejiang Province, after he was cornered by his pursuers. Many people stood around the canal and watched the thief drown in water. A man finally went down into water to pull the thief out after being promised by the police that he would receive a reward of 500 yuan (US$60).

Cold individualists

Such phenomena are not new in China. Rather, they have deeply-rooted cultural connections to the country's long social evolution over thousands of years.

Cai Keping, a columnist, wrote that the great curiosity among Chinese resulted from the nature of an agricultural society, with farmers usually living dull and uneventful lives without variation or entertainment.

He recalled that when he was a child, local villagers would flock onto the narrow road, sometimes with bowls and chop-sticks still in their hands, to watch passing trucks, which were mysterious to them.

"Such spectators revealed a mentality of lowliness and self-belittlement," he said. "The viewers had been accustomed to following blindly, yet were unaware of this. The syndrome is a major defect of the Chinese personality."

Lu Xun, a great man of letters in China, was famous for his sharp criticism of Chinese people's inherent weaknesses, such as fatuity and indifference. He wrote in one article that when he was studying in Japan, his compatriots even cheered when seeing pictures of Chinese people beheaded in a film. He said such morally benighted people could only be senseless viewers or objects for public discussion, no matter how physically strong they were.

In his novel, "Medicine", he mentioned a group of people who vied to watch the execution of a revolutionary. The writer vividly described how they (the viewers) all stretched their necks forward, just as if they were ducks who had been caught and lifted upward.

Other critics have suggested that the spectating behaviours resulted from people's cowardice, a trait closely connected to China's geography and long feudal past.

Because of fortunate natural circumstances, the Chinese are moderate in temper and not aggressive, since they can survive without too much competition. The complementary vice, however, is that Chinese are not good at co-operating with each other. This viewpoint was echoed by Lin Yutang, another renowned writer.

In Lin's eyes, the Chinese are a nation of individualists. Chinese are family-minded, not socially-minded, and the family mind is only a form of magnified selfishness. He pointed to games as an example, because in Chinese card games, each man plays for himself.

"The Chinese like poker, and do not like bridge," he wrote in his book, "My Country, My People". "They have always played mahjong, which is nearer to poker than to bridge. In this philosophy of mahjong may be seen the essence of Chinese individualism."

Lin also attributed Chinese's indifference to the lack of legal protection. He cited the traditional parting instruction of Chinese mothers to their sons: "Don't meddle in public affairs."

"That is because, in a society where legal protection is not given to personal rights, indifference is always safe and has an attractive side to it difficult for Westerners to appreciate," he wrote.

He said that the indifference was not a natural characteristic of the people, but rather a conscious product of Chinese culture.

"The Chinese people take to indifference as the English take to umbrellas, because the political weather always looks a little ominous for the individual who ventures a little too far alone. In other words, indifference has a distinct 'survival-value' in China," he argued.

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