The New Year bells had hardly stopped tolling, when something outwardly tragicomic but inherently disturbing happened in Chengdu, Sichuan.

On Tuesday morning, a young woman was contemplating jumping off a six-story building. It took the police and firefighters five hours to talk the emotional distressed her out of it and move her to safety.

But that made some people very unhappy some onlookers who had gathered on the street to witness the crisis. According to press reports, many of them "held out their necks as if they were ducks dangling from someone's hands."

The mood was boisterously festive. Some yelled: "Come on! Jump!" Others took out their cellphones and snapped pictures or called their friends, asking them to "come and enjoy the spectacle". Still others were so impatient that they complained: "She's just pretending. Why didn't she jump before the police arrived?"

A young man joined in and effectively played the male lead of the revelry by sitting on the window of an opposite building playing a guitar.

Everyone booed in disappointment when the woman was rescued.

One thing these people said was right. The woman did not want to kill herself. Most suicide attempts are cries for help or attention. Migrant workers who threaten to jump off high-rise buildings do it just to get the wages owed to them. People jilted in love usually go through a difficult time of loss and reconciliation. They are not determined to die, but are vulnerable nonetheless.

It was, therefore, terrible for the crowd to act the way they did. Are their lives so pathetically uneventful that they had to witness a possible suicide for pleasure? Wouldn't they feel guilty if she had really jumped? What if she were someone they knew a friend, a family member or simply an acquaintance? I wouldn't say these people were bloodthirsty, but their minds were somewhat twisted. Worse yet, their behavior did suggest something bigger, something about us as a people who have broken out of moral shackles of one kind but have yet to find a new code of ethics.

The incident inevitably reminds one of an episode in one of Lu Xun's stories: A young man was being executed for his involvement in revolutionary activities. A big crowd looked on with nothing but indifference and curiosity on their faces.

The great Chinese writer got inspiration from newsreels he saw when he was a medical student in Japan. He was ashamed that his own compatriots could be so insensitive. That gave him a jolt that the Chinese people needed a writer who would shake them out of their stupor more than a physician who would heal them of bodily wounds.

Most people have attributed this apathy to dire poverty and lack of education. Obviously, this analysis no longer applies. The throng in Chengdu was most likely well fed and adequately educated. Besides their curiosity, the state of mind was different from the spectators at the execution some 100 years ago.

For a long time we were deprived of all good clean fun. Once the floodgates opened, everything rushed out, including the basest instincts. This is entertainment with a vengeance, what popular websites call "entertaining to death." People, hopefully a minority, do not seem to know when to laugh and when to cry, or at the very minimum, to keep a straight face and be appropriately solemn. They have mistaken human decency for hypocrisy.

Why does a society that shapes a budding mind with awe and reverence end up with adults who fail to respect anything, even life itself? Could it be that such qualities as helping the weak and unfortunate are instilled rather than inbred and become slogans to be recited rather than virtues to be integrated?

This is not a cultural issue. Both Chinese and Western cultures teach one to be kind and helpful. However, we are living in a time of such fast change that we can almost feel the sands shifting under our feet. Reattaching what was cut off by political turmoil might be futile, but the garden of moral principles will certainly grow and bloom again. It will take time because the weeds of twisted minds can only be corrected by enlightenment.

raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/06/2007 page4)