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For those who’ve successfully traversed Beijing’s roads: You know it’s no ordinary feat.

China’s Communist political system has roots planted in Confucianism, a set of ethical and philosophical beliefs that stress obedience and community over the individual.

Yet, as a Beijing pedestrian, I sit firmly at the bottom of the food chain. I find myself regularly sprinting across eight-lane roads behind other anxious bodies attempting to weave through the onslaught of aggressive rickshaws, overconfident taxis, and moped drivers more preoccupied with their smoldering cigarettes than avoiding walkers.

The drivers I’ve experienced on Beijing’s roads opt against the use of their brakes, choosing instead (on pedestrian green lights) to swerve around bikers or hassle those around them with the incessant blare of their horn.

Statistics suggest China’s traffic fatalities are double those in the United States, yet China has one-third the cars on the road.

For a country whose Olympic opening ceremony featured 3,000 people reciting Confucian quotations, and one whose system of government, in theory, stands for collectivism, this lack of community on the road perplexes me.

On June 30, the government’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, reported that a police officer in Anhui Province sitting in his car refused to drive to a hospital a one-year-old boy who’d been struck in a hit-and-run accident. The distraught father was unsuccessful in his attempt to hail passing vehicles to help him in time to save his son.

A China Central Television (CCTV) report in May picked up on a similar theme. The report highlighted that while roughly 90 percent of cars make way for ambulances, 10 percent either pull in front of emergency vehicles or block their way.

This aggression and general lack of regard for the lives of others, thankfully seems limited to the nation’s streets. Away from the roads I have found myself embraced by strangers and felt the community I see lacking on the street.

Through these varied interactions, I have come to understand that China’s burgeoning population and the tremendous pressure to succeed that has divided its people are in part to blame.

Perhaps this has to do with China’s growing pains as it tries to bring its rural population into cities and out of poverty. Over the past three decades, a staggering half a billion people have migrated into the urban fold, all looking for jobs and aiming for success.

Another 250 million are expected to make the same transition, meaning that 70 percent of China’s 1.35 billion population will live in urban areas by 2025.

Although poverty in China has declined significantly as a result, there remain huge challenges for the nation, many associated with wealth disparity, environmental pollution and massive internal corruption that have promoted the pervasive ‘individualistic’ mentality when removed from the comforts of family.

On the streets, every man (or woman) must fend for him or herself.

One interpretation of “right-of-way” in Chinese is 先行权, literally translated as “first go rights.” It seems this direct translation is how road etiquette has been understood and applied on Beijing’s streets: the first in the way has the right on the road.

But some drivers have taken this interpretation to the extreme. I’ve witnessed motorists intentionally avoid eye contact with huddles of pedestrians in order to convey their intention of charging on.

Predictably, what is written in law is quite different than what takes place on the roads.

Article 47 of China’s first collection of traffic laws, known as the Road Traffic Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China, states: “When passing a pedestrian crosswalk, the driver shall reduce speed; and when pedestrians are passing the crosswalk, the driver shall stop to give way to the pedestrians.”

But having only been adopted in May 2004, these laws represent a relatively recent development and certainly, as is often the case in China, there is no enforcement.

Laws in China, whether relative to chemical discharge or road safety, are frequently ignored by the public, unenforced by the police or judiciary, and require the injured to endure long, costly and convoluted processes to seek retribution. Chinese law does not make it easy for pedestrians to defend their road rights — or any others for that matter.

Like elsewhere in Chinese life, pedestrians have accepted their place on Beijing’s streets. They’ve embraced patience. I, on the other hand, find myself regularly glaring at unsuspecting drivers, unaffected, as they wiz past me, tires barely missing my toes.

Fast-forward five weeks into a Beijing sojourn and I’m no longer a pedestrian. I own a bicycle. With this purchase, the dynamics on the road have changed for me.

I find myself embracing the same individualistic, winner-takes-all road mentality to (literally) survive. With my bicycle, I’ve begun taking advantage of being a “bigger fish” on the road, ignoring traffic lights, pedestrians and riding down the wrong side of the road. I must confess, the transition was too easy.

I experienced this pressure to conform to anarchy again recently on the subway. As the train doors opened, I felt an influx of people swoop around me and pile into the carriage, unconcerned for those struggling to alight.

While I patiently held my ground I soon realized I was losing valuable space on the train – that by following the rules I was putting myself at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately, it seems, if you obey the teachings of Confucius and adhere to road rules in China, you’re sure to be left behind.

On June 23 of this year, Rev. Charles Moore stepped out of his car in a shopping mall parking lot in Grand Saline, Texas and set himself on fire. The retired United Methodist pastor was 79 years old and was a life long advocate for social justice. He died later that night at Parkland Hospital in Dallas — leaving behind a trail of notes and a lifetime of activism to offer an explanation for his dramatic act.

As social justice advocate Reverend Jeff Hood told The Huffington Post, Rev. Moore was trying to send a message with his dramatic act — both to the United Methodist Church and to the country at large. “Reverend Moore thought this was going to be a whole lot bigger of a deal than it turned out to be,” Hood told HuffPost. “He expected it to make national news.”

Texas-based Tyler Morning Telegraph obtained a copy of one of the notes Moore left behind from the Grand Saline police, and it offers a glimpse into a man deeply troubled by injustice and racism and who carried this pain for decades. He describes the racial discrimination that existed in his hometown of Grand Saline when he was growing up and which often lead to horrific violence. Moore wrote:

“I will soon be 80 years old, and my heart is broken over this. America, and Grand Saline… have never really repented for the atrocities of slavery and its aftermath. What my hometown needs to do is open its heart and its doors to black people as a sign of the rejection of past sins.”

In addition to his hometown, Moore faulted the United Methodist Church for failing to reverse what he saw as backward, discriminatory practices like homophobia and support for the death penalty. In other notes Moore reportedly expressed frustration over his alma mater Southern Methodist University’s successful bid to house the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Earlier letters may have even suggested he originally planned to commit suicide on the school’s campus in protest.

In a note dated June 16, 2014, Moore wrote:

“This decision to sacrifice myself was not impulsive: I have struggled all my life (especially the last several years) with what it means to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insistence that Christ calls a person to come and die seriously. He was not advocating self-immolation, but others have found this to be the necessary deed, as I have myself for some time now: it has been a long Gethsemane, and excruciating to keep my plans from my wife and other members of our family.”

Rev. Hood also uses the metaphor of Jesus at Gethsemane to challenge any who would criticize Moore. In an article on his website Hood writes:

The temptation of the hour will be to turn our heads and call The Rev. Charles Moore insane. If we do we should also turn our heads from Jesus and call him insane too. For we must not forget, Jesus sat in the Garden of Gethsemane and made a conscious clear decision to step out into death…just like Moore.

People who knew Moore recall a man deeply committed to his beliefs and who spent a lifetime working toward social justice. Rev. Jack Albright, who knew Moore in Carthage, Texas and worked with him during the civil rights movement, told the Dallas News:

“When people are raised and spend their life in an atmosphere of segregation, it’s very threatening to make changes. The issue was how hard do you push, especially if you are going to create a lot of confrontation.”

Moore’s son-in-law Rev. Bill Renfro told the United Methodist News Service that there should have been someone in the pastor’s community to help him manage his sense of guilt.

“It would have been nice to have had some sort of counseling, somebody to point out that his life had mattered, that he hadn’t failed. He had done plenty.”

Despite Renfro’s sentiments, Moore’s letters suggest that he was intent upon using his own death to inspire action in those around him. In one note he reportedly wrote:

“I would much prefer to go on living and enjoy my beloved wife and grandchildren and others, but I have come to believe that only my self-immolation will get the attention of anybody and perhaps inspire some to higher service.”

More important than the act of self-immolation, however, is the message Moore was trying to send, Hood told HuffPost. “I don’t know that the answer lies in the fact that he burned himself to death,” Hood said. “The answer lies in why he burned himself to death and why that matters.”

Rev. Dr. Sid Hall, who worked on social justice actions with Moore since the 1990s, also said that the manner of Moore’s death is not as crucial as his message. “I am very clear that his act was not a suicide in the sense we usually think about it,” Hall told HuffPost. “I know this because Charles was driven not by escapism, but engagement.”

The question of why Moore’s act matters lies in something Hood referred to as “radical discipleship,” which Moore demonstrated throughout his life. He helped organize the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP), for instance, which operates today as a resource for those opposed to capital punishment.

And in 1995 he went on hunger strike in hopes of persuading the Council of Bishops, which was meeting in Austin, to change the Book of Discipline’s language on homosexuality, which states among other things that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Rev. Hood, who also serves on the board of TCADP and advocates for LGBT acceptance, describes the role Moore’s activism has played in his own life:

“Because Moore lived, I am able to do the work that I do. My respect for Moore is unwavering and I am proud to follow in his footsteps. Jesus asks us to give our lives and Moore did.”

For any who feel inspired by Moore’s life work but who are troubled by the way he died, Rev. Hall told HuffPost, the key is to continue moving forward:

“I believe the primary lesson we must take from Charles’s life-long convictions, even as we struggle with the way he chose to die, is that we must remain awake to the horrors that surround us and work together to interrupt them, in the name of our deepest humanity and for those of us who are Christian, in the name of Christ.”