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Can anyone point to a good piece of sociological-type writing on the Hong Kong Police Force and how/whether it's changed, especially since the 2014 Occupy protests?
This thread by @xinwenxiaojie touches on some if these issues.
I'm also reminded of this passage, from Graham Robb's "Parisians", about how the French CRS riot police became the bogeymen of the 1968 protests, and the class issues underlying much of that
I'm also reminded of this passage, from Graham Robb's "Parisians", about how the French CRS riot police became the bogeymen of the 1968 protests, and the class issues underlying much of that
There's been a lot of comment since 2014 about how the once-exalted status of the HKPF had diminished as they've ended up as "the tip of the sword" (to borrow a phrase from here: theatlantic.com/national/archi… ) in the battle over Hong Kong's status.
But I still find some of it frustratingly vague. How much of a difference does it make that foreign officers have more or less vanished in the past decade? What are the parallels with controversial past episodes -- not just 2014 and 2016 in Mong Kok, but 1967 too?
How do the income levels of police differ from protesters? They have to be bilingual in Cantonese and English iirc, but to what extent are they more or less "local" -- which seems such a fraught and taboo issue in HK, but so fundamental at the same time.
I would expect a constable born in Guangdong, moved to HK as an adult, joining the police after completing 7-year permanent residency, and seeing a lot of the manifest anti-mainlander feeling in HK, to be markedly less sympathetic to protesters than a locally-born colleague.
To what extent are people like that now a bigger share of the force than they were in the past? And if they are, how does the more localized, less international officer class interact with that changing demographic.
I watched "Comrades: Almost a Love Story" the other day and it reminded me of how the permeable mainlander/local boundary is one of the most fascinating things about HK and, to this outsider, one of the most under-discussed.
Lots of discussion of the *divide* but so little of the *permeability*, which to me is by far the most interesting aspect.
