The Chinese were not the first people to suspect that urbanization was damaging their moral health. In 1964, Americans were shocked by the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese in New York. As The New York Times described it at the time, “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman,” and none of them called police or came to her aid. Americans embraced the story because it conformed to their fears of becoming an uncaring urban society, and the “Genovese syndrome,” as it was known, became a
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