Blood, Toil, Tear and Sweat — Hong Kong in the past 5 months.
Today is 11.11. While this is similar to the Black Friday in U.S. where a lot of people from China, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan would go online shopping, Hong Kongers started a strike that resulted into bloody suppression.
Why’s that? We started our anti-extradition law protest back on 6.9.2019. However, what was a peaceful protest soon turned into a violent suppression. People were shot in the eye. There was, what Hong Kongers called, a tear gas buffet. Police would shoot and spray at press, and they’d chase after protestors who were without arms and leaving the scene.
It didn’t stop there though. I wish that was it.
On 7.21. 2019, there was a group of mobsters from Yuen Long mercilessly and indiscriminately attacked anyone they found in the Yuen Long MTR station. Police was “late”, for 39 minutes to be exact, and was not apologetic at all. In fact, there were photos showing that the police shook hands with those mobsters.
On 8.31. 2019, a team of riot police rushed to the Prince Edward MTR station and reenacted the whole indiscriminate violence in front of Hong Kongers. They beat up anyone they saw on the train, they dragged people out, they refused to let first aider to go in and tend to the wounded, and they eventually locked down the MTR station and cast press and first aider away. Rumor has it, people died inside the station.
That was when Hong Kong started to have a spike in the number of suicide. I don’t have the total numbers here but every day or two, you’d see news of someone jumping off the building naked, or their bodies got discovered in the sea. The most suspicious thing about those who jumped off the building is that there was no blood in the scene. Yet, the Hong Kong police claimed that there was nothing suspicious about it.
You’d think that, after all the unjust and violence, no one in the right mind would support the police. But, sadly this wasn’t a valid prediction. Not only there were people who still support the police. They would actually report those protestors to the police, post the protestors’ personal information online, and express their merriment whenever a protestor get beaten up badly on social media.
Just today, a traffic cop shot an unarmed student, who absolutely in no way pose any threat to that cop, was shot with live rounds in close contact. The kid had lost 3L of blood, lost a kidney and parts of his liver.
And yet, some people cheered. Their words will be, “It’s about time that they shoot the cockroaches.”
Why would anyone in a normal state of mind say such thing? This has been a hugely debated topic in Hong Kong. People have seemed to notice a correlation between age and this cold, merciless and, quite frankly, blinded support to the police. They also hypothesised on the correlation with intelligence, i.e. these people must have been so bad in logical reasoning that their feeble minds could only process the simplest story that they have always been taught — authority is always right. There is one theory involving the emotional intelligence, in which it suggests people who support the police are overwhelmed by the events and choose to shut down their compassion and empathy as it will pain them greatly (very counterintuitive but not entirely wrong from neurobiological perspective). Finally, some cynical ones would just attribute these police supporters to their selfishness and short-sightedness.
I’d attempt to unfold some of the reasons behind in later passages, but whatever the reasons are, Hong Kong is already divided into this very simple, dichotomous binary that is blue (support police) vs. yellow (protestors). Blues would initiate attacks against Yellows, and there were multiple occasions of Blues knifing Yellows in broad day light. The two sides are no longer talking to each other. The information each side receives is completely contradictory to one another. Yellows have also started their own economic community and pledged to only support shops and restaurants that aids the movement or protestors.
I wonder how many years would it take to patch up this deep cut.
#StandwithHK #FreeHK #HKPolicebrutality #HKprotest
