Isms Issue May | Page 18

Driven to Kill I May 2017 Twice more he shifts back and forth be- tween drive and reverse, each time thud- ding over the grandmother’s body. He then speeds away from her corpse. Incredibly, Zhao was found not guilty of intentional homicide. Accepting Zhao’s claim that he thought he was driving over a trash bag, the court of Taizhou in Zhejiang province sentenced him to just three years in prison for “negligence.” Zhao’s case was unusual only in that it was caught on video. As the television anchor not- ed, “You can see online an endless stream of stories talking about cases simi- lar to this one.” lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng – the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times – ended up paying only about $70K in compensation. [ The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him ] “The Double hit cases” have been around for dec- ades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as a fellow English teach- er. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss hit of a mo- torcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common. Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small— amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for In 2010 in Xinyi Ye, video captured a wealthy young man reversing his BMW X6 out of a parking spot. He hits a 3-year-old boy, knocking the child to the ground and rolling over his skull. The driver then shifts his BMW into drive and crushes the child again. Remarkably, the driver then gets out of the BMW, puts the vehicle in re- verse, and guides it with his hand as he walks the vehicle backward over the boy’s body. The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive again, running over the boy one last time as he drives away. Here too, the driver was charged only with acci