This reminds me of that Chinese law about being personally responsible for all medical debts of a person you run over—incentivizing killing the person, rather than injuring them.
You're right about the Snopes article. It does do a decent job of pointing out that a lot of this reporting is rumor based.
This first anecdote (also highlighted by Snopes) is amusing
Double-hit cases" have been around for decades. I first heard of the "hit-to-kill" phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, 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.
So is it Taiwan or the mainland with these wild laws?
That rumor is so stupid it doesn't even begin to stack up. Paying medical bills sucks, but killing someone even unintentionally puts you at risk of jail time. Vanishingly few people are going to choose a decade or more of hard labor in jail over paying a debt.
The only thing this whole rumor proves is that people will believe the most irrational things about China as long as it makes Chinese people look bad.
This reminds me of that Chinese law about being personally responsible for all medical debts of a person you run over—incentivizing killing the person, rather than injuring them.
I've seen this in comments a lot but never a source, do you happen to have one?
Only source seems to be this Slate article:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/09/why-drivers-in-china-intentionally-kill-the-pedestrians-they-hit-chinas-laws-have-encouraged-the-hit-to-kill-phenomenon.html
In respect to that specific Slate article, Snopes had some issues with it and labeled the story as “unproven”:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-drivers-kill-pedestrians/
The Snopes article does a nice job of pointing out the Slate article’s issues.
You're right about the Snopes article. It does do a decent job of pointing out that a lot of this reporting is rumor based.
This first anecdote (also highlighted by Snopes) is amusing
So is it Taiwan or the mainland with these wild laws?
Another false claim about China, it seems.
Thanks for the links, it's much appreciated
That rumor is so stupid it doesn't even begin to stack up. Paying medical bills sucks, but killing someone even unintentionally puts you at risk of jail time. Vanishingly few people are going to choose a decade or more of hard labor in jail over paying a debt.
The only thing this whole rumor proves is that people will believe the most irrational things about China as long as it makes Chinese people look bad.