A video showing a sport utility vehicle (SUV) running over a toddler while her mother appeared distracted by her cellphone has prompted hand-wringing on Chinese social media about the perils of overusing smartphones.
Surveillance cameras captured a slow-moving SUV hitting a two-year-old girl who had veered into its path.
Her mother, trailing behind on a street in a provincial Chinese city, had been glued to her smartphone and appeared not to notice that the vehicle had started moving.
By the time an ambulance arrived, the girl had died.
In China, as in the US and elsewhere, people are clicking, texting and shopping on their smartphones in droves, and many do so while on the move.
About 710 million people in China, or 92 percent of its Internet users, go online via their smartphones, more than twice as many as in 2012, government data showed. About a quarter of those use only their smartphones.
The toddler’s death last month, in Hunan Province’s Yueyang, has led to an outpouring of anger on Chinese social media about the dangers of being obsessed with one’s smartphone.
Even a local government agency weighed in last week, calling for people to cut back on smartphone use.
“Heart-wrenching” the Shandong provincial prosecutor’s office wrote on a Chinese microblogging site. “Put down your phone. Save the children!”
The death of Tutu, as the girl was identified in Chinese news reports, is just the latest example of how “distracted walking” can threaten public safety.
In August last year, a two-year-old boy in Henan Province died after being struck by an SUV near a shopping mall while his mother was engrossed using her smartphone.
In April, another two-year-old boy with a smartphone-addled mother was run over and killed in Anhui Province.
Liu Qinxue (劉勤學), an expert on smartphone addiction at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, said the Yueyang accident could serve as a warning of the risks of overusing the devices.
“People normally do not think about the potential dangers it might bring,” Liu said. “There’s not enough discussion or awareness.”
Officials in China have documented and publicized the risks of calling or texting while driving.
In 2014, the Shanghai police said that calling or texting while driving had caused nearly 30 percent of 690 fatal automobile accidents between January and October of that year, according to a report in China’s state-run media.
The city’s police installed high-definition traffic cameras to identify motorists who use smartphones while driving, and offenders are fined 200 yuan (US$30) and penalized through a points system.
In March, a lawmaker from Hubei Province proposed in the national legislature that drivers who use cellphones while on the road be criminally charged.
However, policymakers in many countries have paid far less attention to the problem of “distracted walking,” according to a study published last year in the Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering.
The study added that pedestrian incident data was not yet detailed enough for researchers to determine a link between distracted walking and safety problems.
In Hong Kong, subway stations have signs that warn commuters not to stare at their mobile phones while on escalators.
Officials in Seoul recently announced that the city would install outdoor signs that warn pedestrians of the dangers of texting while walking.
However, such signs are rarely, if ever, seen in China.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the relationship between humans and digital devices, said in an e-mail that a declining capacity for solitude and self-reflection had given rise to a dependence on smartphones and created a need for cellphone-free “sacred spaces.”
“Talk to your coworkers, talk to your family,” she said. “Never bring a phone to a meal. No phones in the car. No phones at meetings or in classrooms. We can find our way back to each other.”
Many Chinese social media users have echoed that sentiment since the death of the two-year-old in Yueyang.
“Head-down tribe, it’s time to lift your head now,” one commenter wrote on a microblogging site, using a popular Chinese nickname for smartphone obsessives.
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