The Zhengzhou 120 case has held public attention for days. That is not surprising. Ambulance and police emergency lines touch every person's life and property. Most people hope never to dial them, but if they do, they expect an immediate response. So when something goes wrong, the scrutiny is intense.
The penalties are now out. People from the call handler up to health commission officials overseeing the emergency system have received punishments of different degrees. Many online are still unsatisfied. Some say the penalties are too light; a few even argue the call handler should face negligent homicide charges. Whether paid posters are steering the mood is hard to say. I want to explain how I see it.
First, this is more a problem of mechanism
I do not know the exact workflow of the emergency system or how its software works. Most likely, without a specific address, a dispatcher cannot simply send an ambulance. That would explain why the call handler dialed the patient 11 times and tried to add her on WeChat. But with today's technology, locating a person roughly should not be difficult. The same big-data systems that can assign yellow or red health codes with precision ought to be able to help. If the 120 system could locate the caller, would the dispatcher still have been stuck between Longzihu campus and Minglun campus?
Callers to 120 are not only young people. They include elderly people. And even a young person, like this 20-year-old girl, may be unable to state a precise location for various reasons. In the past, the conditions may not have existed. Now they do. Why not upgrade the system? Curbs can be changed from concrete to marble; nucleic acid testing booths appeared across Zhengzhou overnight. A small fraction of that spending would be more than enough to improve the emergency system.
Second, the dispatcher group has its own problems
Because of cost, many service numbers are now outsourced or handled by AI. Even many nuisance calls are AI. I do not know whether Zhengzhou's 120 dispatchers are outsourced, so I will not claim they are. But some cities do outsource 120 call handling. From the recording and the way the call handler dealt with the situation, it seems she was not thoroughly familiar with the process. When a problem arose, she mechanically kept calling back instead of using her own judgment and initiative. That suggests this group does not receive much attention within the system.
After all, the job looks simple: answer the patient's call, record the address, find the nearest hospital's emergency center, and dispatch a vehicle. That is all. So how are dispatchers managed? How many emergency training sessions do they have each year? What qualifications are required? How are they recruited? Do they hold permanent public-sector posts?
In short
We should look at this calmly. Confucius spoke of taking endings seriously and tracing things back to their roots. Nan Huaijin's reading of that line is useful here: instead of endlessly obsessing over the result, think carefully about why the thing happened. Many people want the call handler to bear criminal responsibility. That is simply unreasonable. If we are strict about it, the handler's statement that she could not send a vehicle without a specific address is hard to fault under the existing rules. Peng's case is deeply regrettable. But beyond regret, it should be a warning to China's emergency system. It should push improvements in unreasonable mechanisms. A second life should not be lost merely because of cold dogma.