英语博客网

Chinese cultural genes in the “running Fan” incident

Editor’s note: a Chinese high school teacher Fan Meizhong has been branded “running Fan” for fleeing a classroom and leaving his students behind during last month’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan. Fan was fired on Monday, and has been accused by the Chinese internet community to be a coward after posting a lengthy article on an online forum where the school teacher claims that he was merely “following human instinct”. While some people understand the choice he made, others say that Fan was rightly fired since he failed to assume the responsibilities of a teacher.
    
Below is a translation of a Chinese article. To read the original article written by Le Yi, please click here.

    
More and more people are showing their sympathy toward “running Fan”. While scholars have been commenting on the incident by applying individualism, collectivism and liberalism to the analyses, I am inclined to examine Fan’s decision of fleeing the classroom through a cultural lens.
    
An ideal comparison for such purposes would be the sinking of the Titanic: the giant ship sank 2.5 hours after it struck an iceberg, leaving her maiden voyage one of the best remembered human catastrophes. During the sinking, male passengers and crew chose to face their death so that women and children could board the lifeboats and live.
    
Cowardice is a common human sentiment, but the way people face and deal with cowardice varies across cultures. The Chinese often refer to “maritime rules” when asked to explain why men gave up their own lives on the Titanic; but the White Star Line, owner of the passenger liner explained to the media in 1912 during a commemoration ceremony that there was no “maritime rules” that require men to sacrifice their lives. They simply did what they chose to do. As Daniel Allen Butler, author of the book Unsinkable says, men on the Titanic gave up their lives because they grew up in an environment that values cavalierism, and they knew that a man’s responsibility for women and children is more important than anything else.
    
Indeed, in a society with cavalier traditions, only the braves could survive, be honored, and benefit the groups they belong to. During combat, cowardice is unacceptable for a coward will only bring humiliation and death to his fellows. In a farming society however, values such as tolerance, forbearance and compliance are crucial to the welfare of the entire community, since the cost of heroism is too high. Therefore, in a traditional farming society like China, the notion “better to live in shame than die with honor” has been deeply rooted in people’s beliefs, making it a very strong cultural gene.
    
In the “running Fan” incident, Mr. Fan Meizhong has indeed been struggling with his own conscience rather than trying to convince the world that he made the right choice. He is too weak to face the devil, and I do not believe that Fan, after the earthquake, would not see self-sacrifice as a virtue, unless he is lunatic.
     
I completely understand the moment of cowardice Fan experienced during the quake. I might feel the same way if I were in that classroom, and perhaps even feel sorry for him. However, I will never understand why so many people in China have been endorsing Fan’s cowardice, because after all, China in the Han and Tang dynasties used to be a brave nation, where men honored courage and honor over everything else in their lives.

（chinaelections.org）