51 . . . is the number of children under the age of 14 killed every day in traffic accidents on the roads of China. That’s 18,500 deaths every year, according to China’s top government research body, a figure that has pushed accidents ahead of disease as the primary dispatcher of young Chinese lives.
By any measure, it is a gruesome tally, but the parental calculations behind it are, if anything, more disturbing. A proportion of those deaths involved child pedestrians, but in all too many cases the victims were passengers.
On paper, China is creating a large, financially potent and emotionally nervous middle class, one that sees the perils of 21st century China and is protective of its little emperors. Yet, curiously, this emerging middle class doesn’t bother much with infant car seats.
Some affluent parents of Beijing and Shanghai may stuff their cars with Maxi-Cosi and the like, but most do not believe in wasting valuable room on the back seat with a cumbersome lump of plastic that meets solely the needs of the smallest bottom in the car. Not when there are grandparents, nannies and other claimants to seat space. Once you get to China’s tier-2 and tier-3 cities, it is hard to find a baby seat in the shops, even if you want one. Most Chinese, when surveyed, believe firmly (but wrongly) that a child is safest in a car when cradled in the arms of an adult.
The grisly result is that just one in every 100 children being whisked around China’s roads is enjoying the ride in any kind of protective seat.
The child deaths are even more poignant for the fact that China’s factories produce millions of high-quality baby seats every year, the overwhelming majority of which are exported.
via China in Numbers: Children pay deadly price for attitude to car seats | The Times.
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