This image was featured last week at Business Insider, part of a photo-collection titled “This Is What Millions Of Young People In China And India REALLY Think.” And what they “REALLY think”, for the most part, is rather disconcerting.
 
Understandably, those living in poverty, merely express hope for a better life. But those who already have a “better life”, seem to be yearning for a deeper meaning to that life, something that really matters – significance beyond materialism.

“Now days many young people do not care about the development of China and the world. They only care about themselves and ignore other people and things around them.”
~ Jia Jia, (25) Guangxi Province.

 
As if to underscore that sentiment, comes this tragic tale from China’s Guangdong Province last week: Chinese toddler run over twice after being left on street.
The 2 year-old girl was hit by a small van in the narrow lane of a busy marketplace;

The driver pauses, and then pulls away, crushing the child for a second time under his rear wheels.
 
It is not the accident itself, but what happens next — or rather doesn’t happen – that has left millions of ordinary Chinese wondering where their country is heading.
 
One by one, no fewer than 18 passers-by are seen on closed circuit television ignoring the girl as she lies, clearly visible in the road, hemorrhaging into the gutter. Not a single one of them stops to help.

 
Unbelievable!
Are they afraid to help? As the article suggests at one point –

“They didn’t ignore the girl, they just didn’t dare help her,” said one comment among many that said that Chinese law had helped create a fear of intervening.

 
Are they so calloused to the suffering of their fellow human beings that they merely look the other way?
Or is a large part of China’s population truly “lost” as the girl’s poster claims of her generation?
Whatever the explanation, the ill-effects of communism on a society are glaringly apparent.

But there are some bright spots. In the last several decades, despite ongoing persecution, the house church movement (protestant Christianity) in China has been spreading rapidly.
 
And there’s the uplifting story of one young woman who found both hope and a meaningful life – in Jesus Christ: Battling against a massive evil.
 
Chai Ling was the commander-in-chief of the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the violent military response to the democracy demonstrations, she went into hiding. Escaping China, she was finally able to make her way to America, earned business degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and launched a successful business; quite an accomplishment!
 
But it wasn’t until 2009, when Chai Ling became a Christian, that her heart was fulfilled. And that was when she launched a ministry called All Girls Allowed. The organization’s mission is to restore life, value, and dignity to girls and mothers, and to reveal the injustice of China’s One-Child Policy:

“Each day there are over 35,000 forced and coerced abortions,” she says. “Every day there are 500 women who commit suicide and a million baby girls abandoned into the streets. Few of them make it into the orphanage systems.”

All Girls Allowed is motivated by the love of Jesus Christ, who—by serving the least of us—set us an example that we should do as he has done for us. We draw inspiration from Jesus’ countercultural concern and affection for women and children, and we hope likewise to restore to them the life, value and dignity that they deserve as fellow image-bearers of God.

If the “lost” would only look in the right place, they too would find the hope, meaning and fulfillment they so poignantly wish for.