BEIJING - They are calling it the death that awakened the conscience of China.
A 2-year-old girl crushed by two vans last week and then ignored by 18 passersby as she lay bleeding on the street died at 12:32 a.m. Friday of systematic organ failure at a hospital in the southern Guangdong province. By midday, there were 2 million condolence messages flooding the Internet for the girl, whose name was Wang Yue, or Yueyue for short.
"Heaven's roads have no cars. Go in peace, little Yueyue," wrote one woman. "Your life woke up this ignorant society. Thanks to little Yueyue for letting us stop our fast-paced steps so we can wait for our soul," wrote a man, Sun Laolin.
The accident happened Oct. 13 at a market in Foshan, a city in Guangdong province. Yueyue's plight has riveted China since Sunday, when harrowing video from a closed-circuit camera at the market went up on the Internet, showing the little girl in red trousers and a dark T-shirt toddling into the path of a delivery van.
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As she lay bleeding on the road, the video shows, people walked or drove by on scooters, in some cases pausing to look at the girl or swerving to avoid her, but not stopping to help or call police. She was hit by another van before a trash collector pulled her out of the road and called Yueyue's mother, who had been hanging laundry at the time the girl wandered off.
Chinese journalists have tracked down many of the 18 people shown on the videotape. Most denied seeing the girl, but one woman, who was shown walking by with her own young daughter, admitted that she left quickly because she was scared.
"I wanted to lift her, but there was so much blood. I was scared," the woman surnamed Lin told the Guangzhou daily.
