Illustration: Sun Ying





If there's one piece of advice rich parents in China should follow, it's this: Don't let your kids anywhere near a car.

The latest case of drunken and deadly idiocy happened in Chengdu, where a 19-year-old, driving a sedan, hit a group of roadside migrant workers, injuring two and killing one.

The culprit, who didn't have a driving license, looked properly distraught in video taken by onlookers, but it was his female companion who really drew ire by yelling "Go on, film me! Yayayaya!" Hardly the best way to behave after vehicular manslaughter.

But such scandals are nothing new. From Yao Jiaxin, a student who stabbed a young mother to death after he hit her with his Chevrolet in October 2010, to Li Tianyi, the 15-year-old son of a famous musician who drunkenly attacked an older couple after bumping his car into theirs and then shouted "Who dares to call the police?"in September 2011, the mixture of entitlement, arrogance, and youth is inevitably disastrous.

Perhaps the most archetypal case is that of Li Qiming, who ploughed his Volkswagon into a crowd of students on campus of the Baoding-based Hebei University in October 2010, killing one and severely injuring another. Detained by campus security, he yelled out "Go ahead, sue me if you dare. My dad is Li Gang!" His father, the deputy director of the local public security bureau, found his family at the center of a media firestorm, while "My dad is Li Gang!" became a popular Internet meme to refer to corrosive family corruption and influence.

There's nowhere that more neatly encapsulates the gulf between China's fuerdai, or "second generation rich," and the rest of society than on the roads. As ordinary people strap-hang to work on buses or the subway, the spoilt children of the elite zoom past in BMWs or Mercedes, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other on the smart phone. In ordinary contexts, their carelessness and callousness is merely annoying. But put them in charge on a ton of metal at 90 kph, and it turns lethal.

And when the incidents go public, they become an easy focus for public rage at a society where it can seem like who you know is more important than what you did when it comes to justice. When the perpetrator seems smugly confident that they can get away with things, netizens' anger boils over. Meanwhile, the victims, usually pedestrians trudging home along the road, are often on the lowest rungs of Chinese society. The gulf between culprit and innocent, rich and poor, is brought into sharp focus.

Admittedly, nothing in China so far has been as bad as in Nepal, where then Prince Paras was widely believed to have killed the country's most popular singer, Praveen Gurung, in a hit-and-run accident in 2000. For a Western equivalent, imagine Prince Harry running over James Blunt.

Along with his cousin Dipendra's murderous family rampage, Paras' reputation as a drunk driver was one of the factors that led to the eventual abolition of the Nepalese monarchy.

China isn't quite at that level of anger. But with every month seeming to bring another rich kid running over a poor one, or some similar scandal of the super-wealthy, the smell of class warfare is hanging heavy in the air in China.

But some Western countries have inequality that, on paper, comes close to rivaling China, without even a fraction of the anger against rich kids. The US or UK fuerdai - actually more like 20th-generation-rich, in the case of some families - simply don't draw the same ire. Paris Hilton might irk, but she hasn't killed anyone.

Partially it's because their parents wouldn't dream of letting them on the roads without a proper license, and certainly wouldn't smile upon them driving drunk. The famous Chinese indulgence of only children may play a powerful role here. Many wealthy Western families instead impose tight limits on their kids, and keep them on relatively tight financial limits till they're old enough to handle money responsibly.

Or perhaps it's because there's more of a sense of noblesse oblige, the responsibility of the rich to the poor. It might just be a cover over fundamental inequality, but elite Western private schools encourage their students to volunteer locally, prospective Ivy League students have to make sure they have the right quota of volunteering on their resumes, and those born into wealth are often the patrons of and donators to charity.

Perhaps that's all it'll take to dampen Chinese society's hatred of rich kids; some decent PR, and learning to drive properly.