Mourning someone pushed to extreme is “immoral”?
Many Hongkongers went to present white flowers to mourn the death of Leung Kin-fai, who stabbed himself to death after stabbing a police officer in Causeway Bay on 1 July 2021, the day the Hong Kong government banned the protests but allowed crowded celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party and the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from British rule to China.
As expected, the government and the police immediately blamed the dead man for violence and branded him as a “lone-wolf terrorist”, and criticised those who mourn the 50-year-old man’s death as “immoral” and the police chief even likened mourning the man’s death to backing terrorism. What drove the man to desperately resort to use such violence to stab the officer and kill himself? The government officials and the police know it very well but they won’t want to admit it. Police violence during the 2019 protests was widely recorded but the government and the police keep denying that and even claim all those reports are “fake news”. In order to enhance their narratives, they keep a heavy-handed approach by arresting people, claiming that those people “incite” violence against the police.
Many netizens in Hong Kong immediately question the Hong Kong police’s impartiality on why they only take actions to arrest people they claim to be “inciting” violence against the police but still take a extremely slow move and indifference approach towards those who really incited violence of the white-clad mobs who attacked citizens at the Yuen Long MTR station on 21 July 2021. Pro-Beijing solicitor and legislator Junius Ho was clearly recorded as related to the people who attacked the citizens but he’s still not under any investigation, not to mention arrest, for being associated with the assailants.
As the Hong Kong government has been using the so-called “National Security Law” and other draconian “laws” to curb freedom of assembly and freedom of expression in the city, many Hong Kong people feel desperate and some feel that they are pushed to the corner. It’s unfortunate that some resorted to violence but it clearly shows people’s despair under severe restrictions on freedoms. For the officials who only execute orders to threaten citizens and restrict their freedoms, they talk about “morality” and criticize citizens mourning the dead man as “immoral”? Isn’t that the biggest joke of all times?
