There is nothing the media and the public, any public, love more than a good sob story. A sick kid who needs an organ, the local teacher who goes beyond the call of duty, the hard-done by battler fallen on hard times.

Pundits, analysts and China watchers tend to focus on the country’s economic miracle, its complex politics and the impact these will have on the wider world.

As a journalist I have always been more interested in the human stories. They are often dismissed as ‘soft news’ but to my mind, the stories a country tells itself about it’s people can reveal more about a national mindset than any set of statistics.

And few places consume tales of woe with as much fericous enthusiasm as China.

Sick mothers, generous migrant workers, filial children caring for ailing parents – tales of heroism and self sacrifice are never in short supply.

But the human interest stories from China that make headlines in the West are often of shocking indifference and cruelty. Many will recall the story of YueYue, the 2-year old girl in Foshan who was run over by a truck and lay injured by the road, ignored by passer-bys until, finally, the 19th person to walk past went to her aid. Or the Daily Mail favourite, Eagle Dad, the father who forced his 4-year old son to run in the snow to toughen him up. Those stories made headlines around the world and fed into some unfortunate stereotypes about Chinese.

In China those stories prompted much soul searching and debate on whether the country was in a ‘moral vacuum’. But the big “human interest” stories of the past year, the ones that didn’t make headlines outside of China, paint a far more complex picture.

When Beijinger Fan Meng discovered his wheelchair-bound mother always dreamt of visiting Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province he decided to take her there. On foot. Pushing her wheelchair, Fan and his mother traversed the country, spending three months to reach their destination on the adventure of a lifetime. They were accompanied by the family dog, Butterfly. Continue reading →