My Take | Protesters see the police as an occupation force
- Rightly or wrongly, officers are often perceived as being in the service of an outside power, and the fact that they are locals makes them worse than the People’s Liberation Army or People’s Armed Police
For a while after the 1997 handover, some Hong Kong people such as the late, honourable Szeto Wah thought the city would help democratise the rest of China. More recently, people here are far more worried about being “mainlandised”.
The current unrest stems mostly from this fear in the gut. That, if you get down to it, is why large swathes of the local population are willing to tolerate what in all other major cities would be seen as riots and hooliganism.
It’s even more disturbing that many ordinary people and mainstream media pundits don’t seem very bothered about a police officer who just got off work being ambushed and viciously hacked possibly for just wearing a uniform.
Such acts may be undesirable, but can be justified so long as it’s seen as part of the resistance to mainland encroachment. By contrast, given the local sensitivity, anything related to the mainland or the central government, whether actually intrusive or only potentially so, will be all lumped together as more fuel to the resistance and resentment. What is happening now, weekend after weekend, is the result.
Some pro-government people ask why so many locals hate the police when their anti-riot operations don’t seem to be much worse than those of their peers in major Western cities, if only more restrained and less deadly.
Well, it’s simple. Rightly or wrongly, the police are seen by many protesters and rioters effectively as an occupation force in the service of an outside power. The fact that they are local people make them even worse than troops from the People’s Liberation Army or People’s Armed Police.
Some of the frustration of the protesters – and I read this more than once in LIHKG.com, the go-to online forum for the city’s disaffected youth – comes from Beijing not having sent in mainland troops. For all their efforts and perceived self-sacrifice, many of them would rather face Chinese troops than Hong Kong police because the latter, though considered evil or illegitimate by some in the city, are at least seen as doing their job by most foreign observers. But the presence of Chinese troops in the city, no matter what they do, would immediately cause global condemnation while legitimising and glorifying the local resistance movement universally.
Well, if you wonder why the central government hasn’t sent troops, it’s because they think along the same line as the protesters.