Have you ever been to truly starving places? Not taking about poor countries, literally starving places, like, Syria in WWI. Where if you don't steal from your neighbor, your kids will die of hunger. That's the kind of environment where compassion is a luxury. A lot of China was like that _even if for a short time_ in the last century. That leaves deep scars.

Not a lot of the world is like that today, you'd have to go pretty far out of anything considered tourist-friendly to see conditions similar to Mao-induced famine.