I have been helped by passers-by more times than I can remember here in Minnesota. One memorable occasion, on my first winter here after living in Taiwan for th

I have been helped by passers-by more times than I can remember here in Minnesota. One memorable occasion, on my first winter here after living in Taiwan for three years, was using my forgotten skills in driving on a snowy road to go to a meeting with friends. On the way back home, my car spun off a freeway entrance, burying itself into a snowbank just off the side of the driving lane. Within less than a minute, a woman passing by stopped and asked if she could help. Within no more than a minute more, a man driving a pickup truck worked out how to push my car out of the snowbank and back on to the freeway ramp. I see people stopping to help strangers here all the time. I was walking home from a research run to the local public library the other day when I had a chance to be the helpful bystander. A woman at the local gas station, who appeared to be a South Asian woman in her forties, asked me to go over to her car. She was trying to fill her tires with air, but couldn't get the stem cap off from one of her tires. After I fiddled with it for a while, I was able to remove it. I asked her if she needed any more help, and she said no. She apparently had a high enough degree of social trust to ask a stranger to approach her. Most of the personal injury situations I observe in my American life are young people injured at soccer games--always with bystanders around who know the children, often including medical doctors or nurses--or children who have fallen off their bikes. Whenever I see something like that, I respond. Once when one of my children fell off his bike and broke his arm, he was with two siblings (on the way home from the same library I frequent) and they worked out to send one child home speedily by bike, while the other sibling walked the other bikes and my injured son in the direction of home. I was able to meet up with him halfway and drive him to the hospital. We live in a safe neighborhood here, and part of what makes it safe is that neighbors look out for one another. Social trust is almost always lower in dictatorships than in well functioning democracies. (My two stays in Taiwan, one in the early 1980s under the dictatorship, and one around the turn of the century after democratization, provided vivid examples of that.) People in Taiwan have always been very kind to foreigners in low-danger encounters. But I recall more bystander neglect amid the frequent traffic crashes of motorcycles there under the dictatorship than over a similar time span under the freely elected government. China probably has to move in the direction of more political power to the people and less censorship of information channels to build up more social trust and more care for strangers.