Doing the right thing

The silence from bystanders was deafening when all you could hear from videos of the Zhaoyuan beating was a woman's screams. The subsequent soul-searching reveals a nation caught in a quandary between the instincts for self-protection and the need to act.

A nation was shocked over the weekend when videos of a vicious beating went viral. On the evening of May 28, a diner at a local McDonald's restaurant in Zhaoyuan, Shandong province, was approached by six people who asked for her phone number. She refused.

They lashed out at her, and she was pronounced dead a few hours later.