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Feb 27, 2010
Anger in China over payout for S’porean killed in crash
BEIJING: The family of a Singaporean killed in a car crash in China has been awarded compensation 2-1/2 times higher than usual, prompting heated debate among Chinese over whether a foreigner’s life is worth more than a local’s.
Citing the higher cost of living in Singapore, a court in China’s central Hunan province ordered defendants to pay the victim’s family 800,000 yuan ($165,000) – more than twice the compensation set for locals.
The defendants are appealing against the rare ruling, which has drawn scorn from local netizens and newspapers. They decried it as unjustified special treatment for foreigners – even as legal scholars backed the court’s decision.
The 25-year-old victim, Mr Chen Rui, was visiting his parents in Hunan’s Hengyang city when he died in an accident last March, the Singapore Consulate-General in Guangzhou told The Straits Times.
Citing court documents, the China Youth Daily newspaper said that on the morning of March 9, Mr Chen was a passenger in a car that was involved in a four-vehicle pile-up on a highway in Hengyang. Mr Chen was the only fatality. Three locals were injured.
A police investigation said the driver of a trailer and the driver of the car carrying Mr Chen were to blame for the crash.
Following that, Mr Chen’s parents sued the two men for four million yuan in compensation.
According to the China Youth Daily report, mainland-born Mr Chen had gone to Singapore to study years earlier. Upon graduation, he became a Singapore citizen. His parents were quoted as saying that he was their only child, and that his death had brought them significant emotional and economic distress.
Traffic accident laws in China state that compensation for death and injury is calculated based on the average incomes of urban or rural residents in the region in which the accident took place.
Using this, the defendants’ lawyers argued that Mr Chen’s family should be awarded 330,000 yuan, as would happen if he had been an urban resident from Hengyang.
But the court ruled that that would be ‘unfair’. It ordered a much higher compensation of 800,000 yuan, arguing that Singapore, where Mr Chen lived, had higher income levels and living standards.
The defendants are now appealing against this ruling.
The case, first reported in Chinese newspapers on Wednesday, has prompted thousands of postings on Chinese online forums, the vast majority of them slamming the court’s decision.
Several branded the judges ‘traitors’ and demanded to know why a foreigner’s life was ‘worth’ more than a local’s.
A netizen nicknamed ‘Doctor Li Jing’ asked: ‘Are the Chinese people second-class citizens in their own country?’
While it is not unusual for a news item to draw tens of thousands of angry comments online, newspapers have jumped on the bandwagon.
A columnist in the state-controlled Global Times argued that ‘a life is a life’ and that ‘the standard should be the same for everyone’.
But legal experts who spoke to The Straits Times found no fault with the ruling. Law scholar Gong Xiantian, of Peking University, said that while the law makes no special mention of foreigners, the court did right in granting a higher compensation since the victim lived in a place with higher living costs.
‘The court considered things from the principle of fairness,’ he said.
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