Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

It's one of the oldest scams in the book: jumping, or rather, walking deliberately in front of a moving vehicle, and feigning injuries in order to extort money from the unsuspecting driver.

It's hard to imagine such tricks still work. After all, we live in a society where people don't dare help fallen elderly people up onto their feet for fear of being accused of knocking them down.

That's why when last week pictures popped up online with a woman holding onto a scooter and a foreigner with a perplexed look on his face, people were quick to jump into a fury. People were quick to piece together the story: the middle-aged woman accused the foreigner of running into her with his scooter and asked for 1,800 yuan ($296) for her injuries. She grabbed both the bike and the foreigner, to stop him from leaving. The foreigner was confused, felt wronged and seemed almost on the verge of tears.

What's more interesting than the story is how people, especially Web users, responded.

It soon became the most discussed topic of the day. Web users condemned the woman, and expressed sympathy for the young man. Shameless fraudsters are now even running scams targeting foreigners, some said. Our poor, innocent foreign friends probably never dreamed such a thing could happen.

It would have been just another example of how morality is decaying in China, except for the twist later that afternoon when a different version of the story started to surface. In this version, the young man did knock down the woman, though the accident didn't seem too serious, and when the woman tried to stop the man from leaving and demanded compensation, the foreigner started to curse at the woman in fluent Chinese.

Now all of a sudden, all those people who "knew the truth" started to appear online. They started to sympathize with the Chinese woman and blame the foreigner, although it didn't quite turn into the nationalistic surge of public opinion surrounding an incident where a drunken foreigner assaulted a Chinese woman on the street.

What is the truth? We may never know. Surveillance video from a camera on that crossroad seemed to indicate that the man ran a red light and hit the woman. But how badly the woman was injured, whether she was exaggerating the situation, and whether the foreigner was trying to get away, we may never know.

But facts don't seem to be the top concern for Chinese Web users, or perhaps, for Web users anywhere. Without knowing what had really happened, people are eager to express their opinions. Most aren't even evidence-based arguments, just rants. It's especially tricky when foreigners are involved. Web users easily fall under two lines of thinking: "despicable Chinese people are losing face for our country," or the nationalistic "foreign devils get out!"

With the rise of Weibo and other social media, everybody can easily voice their opinions about almost anything. Even though everybody is entitled to their own opinion, not all opinions are equal. Without facts and logic, opinions are meaningless. We could certainly do with more facts, and less talk.



This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.