Dionne Warwick’s 1964 single Walk on by makes the perfect headline. Two-year-old Yueyue died yesterday, a few days after she had been run over and left in a bloody mess on the streets in China. The country is in shock at the way 18 passers-by ignored the child, only to be saved by, of all people, a scrap picker.

In chilling CCTV footage, Yueyue is shown toddling along a market street in the town of Foshan. A van strikes her, slows down, but then carries on, rolling a back wheel over the prone toddler’s body. She lies in a pool of blood and is ignored by about 18 passers-by. That is when another van strikes her and the scrap picker scoops her up.

The Guangzhou Military District General Hospital said that the two-year-old girl, Wang Yue (nicknamed ‘Little Yueyue’), died shortly after midnight of brain and organ failure. “Her injuries were too severe and the treatment had no effect,” intensive care unit director Su Lei said.

After the footage emerged, the social networks went wild, saying that the incident highlighted the decay in public morals that has come with a booming economy and growth at breakneck speed.

Many in China have blamed the incident on riches distracting people from morality, as well as pure cold-heartedness, as Li Xiangping, a professor of religion at Huadong University, said.

Some experts said an unwillingness to help others is an outgrowth of urbanisation as migrants pour into cities and create neighbourhoods of strangers.

But as experts in China have put it, this phenomenon is increasing all over the world, and there is no doubt that it is the capitalist system that feeds it. One cannot understand just how so many old men and women in the US, and its major cities, live from hand to mouth, dressed up in bags and rags, pushing all their worldly possessions along in a trolley.

These people die from exposure in the winter, and what do people do? They walk on by. It is also no coincidence that the highest rate of child abuse and neglect is found in the US. In the most advanced country in the world, where there is no welfare state to speak of, children are at the mercy of their parents and immediate family.

Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 US children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada’s and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year.

But what of Europe? While we may treat our children better, we too walk on by. How many times have we, Maltese citizens, just walked past tramps, maimed beggars and dirty street urchins. Are we all just passers-by? Do we have individual responsibility? Or is it the responsibility of the state? The answer is much deeper, it is a collective responsibility. In times where economies are going to the dogs, things are only going to get worse. Are we going to play by the rules of capitalism, and leave those in the gutter where they are? Or are we going to revise our morals, and go back to some form of actually giving a damn about others, whether they are strangers or neighbours?