THIS is not normal. This is not normal. This is not normal. If you do not take regular trips outside Hong Kong, I would strongly advise you to spend some time every week repeating the above mantra.
Otherwise, you risk falling into the trap of thinking that the way things are done here is the way things are done in mature, civilised, modern societies. And that is an egregious error.
Foreign correspondents have a useful little trick which they use to keep themselves from being seduced into sharing the mindsets of the places where they have been posted.
It is called Substitutions, and it is really a kind of reality check. It is particularly helpful following an event like the recent Hong Kong election.
This is how you play: you make a list of recent reports - unexceptional Hong Kong stories that appear in the pages of this and other papers.
Then you go through the list and replace all the proper nouns (and sometimes 'improper' nouns) with names and places from outside Hong Kong. All of a sudden, the scales fall from our eyes and we see our society as the bizarre place it really is.