I think you have to look at this from a certain perspective. Think about it, this is a country of 1.3 billion people. How often does this actually happen?
Secondly, think about incentives. Maybe I am hopelessly naive, but I believe that the majority of human beings have something built into them that stops them from hurting others. For the majority of humanity, you don't need laws against murder, internal morality and social pressure is sufficient. However, this is a small subset of humanity that would make RATIONAL rather than MORAL choices about murder if forced to make a choice about it. This is the reason that murder has such high penalties, for those people.
tldr; China needs to raise the expected penalty for engaging in this sort of behavior to the point that it is not rational. This isn't necessary for the great majority of Chinese (any more than it is anywhere else in the world) but it is necessary for some.
One thing baffles me. If parents knew (there is security camera footage) that their child was run over several times because some asshole made a RATIONAL choice; and then said parents hired a bunch of guys to disappear the asshole, suddenly the expected penalty would change, and so would the rational choice. (There probably wouldn't be much of an investigation, either.) So why aren't they doing it? If the government can't/won't set the proper incentives for the assholes not to murder, why can't the people do it themselves? Desperate times call for desperate measures...
ADDENDUM: admittedly my comment above is emotional. Obviously not every accident ends in the driver running over the victim several times. But from the article and from some of the comments, I got an impression that these cases are not THAT unusual, and it's not just a case of a Western newspaper publishing a sensationalist Sinophobic article.
Sure, this is an extreme case but when living in china you are confronted daily to behaviours that defies our sense of moral. China should pour founds into education but they will never do as educated people would be the end of "elite controlled" china of today.
Think about it, this is a country of 1.3 billion people. How often does this actually happen?
In the Slate Plus special feature section, the author of the article shared statistics on how frequently traffic accidents result in death in China, compared with the United States. In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 deaths, compared to over two million injuries in traffic accidents. That means that, in the United States, there are 70 injuries per every traffic death. According to China's Xinhua News Agency, the ratio of traffic injuries to deaths in China is four to one.
Secondly, think about incentives. Maybe I am hopelessly naive, but I believe that the majority of human beings have something built into them that stops them from hurting others. For the majority of humanity, you don't need laws against murder, internal morality and social pressure is sufficient. However, this is a small subset of humanity that would make RATIONAL rather than MORAL choices about murder if forced to make a choice about it. This is the reason that murder has such high penalties, for those people.
tldr; China needs to raise the expected penalty for engaging in this sort of behavior to the point that it is not rational. This isn't necessary for the great majority of Chinese (any more than it is anywhere else in the world) but it is necessary for some.
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