Hong Kong police deserve kudos for restraint, professionalism|Comment HK|chinadaily.com.cn

Amid increasingly violent protests wreaking havoc on the beautiful and once among the world’s safest cities, Hong Kong, admirable are the moral courage and civic spirit of movie star and philanthropist Jackie Chan, four-time Hong Kong Film Award Best Actor-winner Tony Leung Ka-fai, upcoming Disney blockbuster movie Mulan actress Liu Yifei, fishermen, and other citizens in expressing support for the besieged, outnumbered, often-unfairly defamed and yet heroic police.

Without its credible and efficient police, Hong Kong would have long ago imploded socially and economically due to the weekly protests and the escalating tyranny of mob rioters.

In recent disquieting days and weeks, we’ve read news of tragic deaths and bloody violence in protests raging like wildfires worldwide from Chile and Spain to the yearlong weekly so-called “yellow vest” protests in France. In Lebanon alone, some 150 people were killed in five most-intense days of protests in October. In Iraq, the protest death toll reached 67 over a recent weekend.

In stark contrast, Hong Kong’s zero deaths in five months of often-violent protests and increasingly barbarous riots are testament to the comparative restraint and high-level professionalism of the city’s police force. The consistently good track record of Hong Kong’s police has for many years deservedly earned them the enviable reputation as “Asia’s Finest”.

“I must say I sympathize a great deal with the police officers in Hong Kong. They’ve been trying to do a good job under very difficult circumstances,” said Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s senior diplomat who is a former president of the UN Security Council, the founding dean of the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, a former fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and now a distinguished fellow of the Asia Research Institute.

Compared to the British colonial government’s mid-1960s tough police responses to protests in Hong Kong that resulted in scores of deaths, hundreds of injured people and thousands of arrests, and also compared to other countries’ more-draconian police responses to protests, it is my belief that today’s Hong Kong police have been comparatively more lenient and patient in the past five months of battling increasingly virulent protests.

Due to some Western politicians and segments of their media with cognitive biases against a resurgent China and its generally successful 22-year “one country, two systems” policy for this city before these protests, they have perfidiously besmirched the honor of the Hong Kong police. They have also almost blindly, simplistically romanticized all dissidents as “pro-democracy protesters” instead of unmasking not a few of them as bellicose anarchists.

Slick social media disinformation and other black propaganda have attempted to demonize the Hong Kong police despite protesters’ increasing blatant use of excessive force and mindless mayhem. Rioters once shut down the world’s eighth-busiest airport and have repeatedly damaged subways, vandalized businesses, discombobulated the city’s famously efficient traffic flow, imperiled the economy and messed up the lives of Hong Kong’s silent majority of numerous decent people.

I can’t help but salute the ardent sense of duty and fortitude of the Hong Kong police in safeguarding law and order without infringing on the people’s right to dissent and freedom of expression, which are hallmarks of the distinctive autonomous character of perhaps Asia’s most vibrantly free city.

Numbering only over 30,000 police officers and backed by about 4,600 civilian officers, the Hong Kong Police Force is definitely one of the world’s finest. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region most recently ranked No 6 out of the world’s 140 countries and territories in the reliability of police services in the 2018 Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum.

For many years, Hong Kong’s highly effective police force, strong rule of law, market economy and the people’s traditional Confucian social discipline have made this city a very safe tourist paradise, stable international financial center and a favorite multinational corporate hub. Leaders and all sectors of Hong Kong society should not only vigorously support their valiant police, but also proactively help them uphold law and order, stop the unruly anarchists and punish all lawless rioters. Mobocracy isn’t democracy, and violence is not freedom of expression!

Many Asians share my high respect for the social conscience and guts of Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Mulan’s Liu Yifei, the fishermen and other righteous Hong Kong people for coming out to support their much-harassed but nevertheless gritty, adroit and noble police force, who are the vanguards of Hong Kong’s economic dynamism, social harmony, stability and rule of law.

(HK Edition 11/05/2019 page7)