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BEIJING, China, September 15, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The deep veneration for parents and the elderly that has been a traditional mark of Chinese culture is rapidly deteriorating after decades of anti-life population control measures in the Communist state, reveal a series of recent surveys.

“Thirty years of anti-people propaganda have left their mark,” said Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher. “Like Hitler’s campaign to eliminate ‘useless eaters,’ the one-child policy has created the impression in the minds of the young that the principal hindrance to China’s development is too many people.”

An online poll by Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television found that fewer than 7% of 20,000 respondents would stop to offer help to an elderly person in distress. More than 45% said they would turn a blind eye while 43% said they would help only if their actions were caught on camera.

A poll by China’s leading microblog Sina Weibo showed a similar result, as only 20% of respondents said they would “definitely” help. Forty-three percent said they would not help and thirty-eight percent said they were not sure what they would do.

An online survey by the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, The People’s Daily, found that 80% of respondents would not help an elderly person in distress for fear of extortion.

Chinese media report that the poll results have been shaped in part by the case of 65-year-old Xu Shuolan, who sued a man after he offered her aid when she fell and broke her hip.

The incident occurred in November 2006 as Xu was boarding a bus in the city of Nanjing. A man, Peng Yu, gave the woman 200 yuan and escorted her to the hospital, staying with her until her family arrived.  But Xu responded by suing Peng for 136,419 yuan, or $18,000, claiming that he was the one who knocked her down. A court ruled against Peng, ordering him to pay Xu 45,000 yuan.

In a similar case, a court ordered compensation be paid to an elderly woman who fell four to five meters from a car because she was afraid she might hit it.

The societal impact of these cases was seen in 2009, when an elderly Nanjing man who fell at a bus stop was only offered help after he yelled out to the bystanders, “I fell on my own, all of you do not need to worry; it had nothing to do with all of you.”

Most recently, on September 4, in the town of Wuhan, hundreds of people passed by an 88-year-old man without raising a hand to help him as he lay on the ground. An hour and a half later, relatives arrived to take Mr. Li to hospital to treat his bleeding nose.

The problem is so widespread that China’s Health Ministry has issued a 41-page document entitled “Technical Guidelines for Preventing and Treating Falls by the Elderly.” The document, which had been in the works for a few years, sparked a debate on the Internet. On the Guidelines’ suggestion to call an elderly person’s relatives to take him or her to hospital, a freelance journalist, Shui Yinhe, tweeted on Sina Weibo, If “we can’t get in touch with them, what can we do? Let them wait to die?”

Some have responded by suggesting the would-be rescuers should wait for the arrival of witnesses before helping an elderly person in need, take pictures with a mobile phone before intervening, never give their name, or avoid using their own phone to make emergency calls.

“One of the many unintended consequences of China’s one-child policy is the falling social status of the elderly,” Mosher told LifeSiteNews. “Young people, who are scarce, are prized, while the elderly, who are numerous, are despised.”

“The same government that has forcibly aborted hundreds of millions of unborn children will not hesitate to send an equal number of elderly to an early grave. The demographic logic of China’s one-child policy almost dictates that mass euthanasia will follow on the heels of mass abortions,” he said.