Are the locks gone from our playgrounds yet?
Ahead of tomorrow's
scheduled re-openings of cinemas, bars and a number of other leisure
facilities (though not yet karaoke lounges, party rooms and nightclubs), Hong Kong reported having four new Wuhan coronavirus cases today. But while that quartet of cases broke the territory's two-day run of zero new cases, the Big Lychee still has gone for 18 days in a row without a local transmission -- something much of the world (including the USA, UK, Russia and even Singapore, with a smaller population than Hong Kong) can only dream of right now for their home territories.
Now for the not so good news for Hong Kong: Last night, the police went into a shopping mall once more to break up a singing protest; over the course of which they proceeded to do such as randomly attack a bystander (presumably because they suspected him to be a protestor since he was in black attire -- like many regular Hong Kongers (like, say, New Yorkers and Tokyoites) often are) while in the vicinity of mothers and their young children as well access the mall despite mall staff urging them not to do so. And elsewhere in the city that same evening, Central and Western district councillors staged a sit-in outside one of their colleagues' office to protest their meeting room being locked following a dispute with the Home Affairs Department over their meeting agenda.
That very same day, China's Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office saw fit to release a
statement in which Hong Kong's pro-democracy protestors were
characterized not just as "poisonous", "violent" and "recklessly
demented" but also as a "political virus". Lest it not be clear: Beijing has effectively declared that the majority of Hong Kongers are not human and earmarked them/us for elimination; the way that they did so for the Uigyhurs of Xinjiang.
For
the record: this is not the first time Hong Kong pro-democracy
protestors have been described in language that some associate with
those planning genocides. By this, I mean that months ago, the Hong Kong police took to referring to some of their fellow Hong Kong denizens as "cockroaches" -- a
dehumanizing term infamously used by the Rwandans who incited their
fellow humans to commit the massacre of Tutsi people in 1994.
Suffice to say that we've known for some time now that the Hong Kong police are far from being Asia's finest and upright upholders of the law. But confirmation of this just keeps on coming to the surface. Remember the
police officer infected with the Wuhan coronavirus who refused to wear a
mask while being attended to in a hospital, thereby putting medical
staff at risk of infection?
Actually,
one doesn't have to go further back than this week to get examples of
police misconduct outside of that enacted when going up against
protestors. More specifically, the Hong Kong Free Press published an English language account of accounts by members of the Chinese language press of a number of police top brass' being embroiled in property scandals this past Monday. And this morning, there came came news of a different police officer having been arrested for being in possession of HK$1 million of crystal meth, presumably procured by way of his involvement in a sting operation that had successfully seized a record 296 kilograms of the drug last week.
Truly, it's sad to see how low the Hong Kong police's reputation has sunk since that
day in September 2014 when they horrified Hong Kongers by firing tear
gas into a crowd of peaceful local protestors for the first time ever. Remember how shocked people were then by their actions -- and, also, the beating up of Ken Tsang in October that same year?
Amazingly, they pale in comparison to a good amount of what has taken place in full view of cameras (many of them with live feeds) in the past year. And one really does shudder to think of what has taken place off camera in places like San Uk Ling, while protestors were incarcerated in regular prisons, and inside Prince Edward MTR station on the night of August 31st last year. :(
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