A Jaywalker Caused a Nanjing Pileup and Owes Nothing: Chinese Traffic Law Blames the Cars Behind
Traffic police in Nanjing ruled that a chain of rear-end collisions set off by an elderly man dashing across an expressway were the drivers' fault, not his — a verdict that, a week after the mediated Jiuzhaigou scuffle, has pushed the question of age and accountability back into the open.
The dashcam clip is seconds of bad luck: a car traveling in its lane on Nanjing's Jiangbei Expressway brakes hard as an elderly man trots across the lanes from the right; the vehicles behind cannot stop in time, and several of them run into one another. The ruling that followed, reported by Jiangsu Broadcasting's Litchi News and recirculated Tuesday by Sina Hot, is what set off the argument: the rear-end drivers will divide liability among themselves in proportion to fault, and the man who set it in motion bears none.
To an outsider the verdict looks upside down; under Chinese traffic rules it is the default. A rear-end collision presumes the follower failed to keep a stopping distance, and liability between vehicles and pedestrians tilts toward the vehicle, on the theory that steel must yield to flesh. Lawyers unpacked the drivers' narrow recourse after the ruling: suing the jaywalker requires the official accident determination to assign him a share of fault, and even then a claim is not guaranteed — though darting across an expressway is, as the lawyers noted, plainly unlawful and a grave fault.
The verdict sat high on Baidu's hot board for much of Tuesday, an audience well beyond Weibo, because it lands on an open nerve: fault without cost.
The nerve has a fresh scar. A week ago, a 62-year-old man and his 58-year-old companion beat two tourists in their twenties at Jiuzhaigou over a photo spot; police mediated at both sides' request, and the parties apologized to one another — the case ended in handshakes. This week The Paper published a pointed editorial on that ending: an elderly man's punching of two younger visitors should not resolve as mutual apology, it argued, but as 一断于法，无关年龄 — let the law decide, age has nothing to do with it.
There are counterweights, and commenters raised them: an expressway is no place for a pedestrian, and in any collision there the old man was the likeliest death. The law's asymmetry exists to protect the vulnerable, and most of the time it does. The discomfort is narrower and sharper: someone who broke the law walked away whole, and the people driving within it paid.
The Nanjing file is closed as far as the police are concerned; the drivers' practical recourse is their insurers. The argument has moved to the next case — and, for the first time this month, official media has said in print which way it thinks that one should go.