Many years ago I was intrigued for a while by a French writer, Roger Peyrefitte. Mr Peyrefitte is now remembered mainly for his defiant and indeed celebratory account of his own homosexual tastes, although his preferred partners seem to have been rather young by current standards.
But I was too young and innocent for this so it rather passed me by. The thing which interested me in his biographical work was the exploration of a topic rarely explored, the feelings and motivations of those who worked for the Vichy regime which ran France on the Germans’ behalf from 1940 to 1945.
There was a personal explanation for his interest in this. Mr Peyrefitte joined the French diplomatic service after leaving the relevant Ecole as the top scorer of his year, and spent a happy eight years in the Athens Embassy.
This happiness was enhanced by the fact that the Greeks were very relaxed about homosexuality, which was then still illegal in France. Unfortunately Mr Peyrefitte got into habits which were regarded as scandalous when he returned to work in the HQ in Paris. So he was persuaded to resign from the service in 1940.
In 1943 the Vichy regime invited him back, an invitation which he accepted. As a result in 1945 when that regime was overthrown and replaced he was drummed out again. This did him no serious harm; he devoted the rest of his life to literary pursuits with some success. The French are broad-minded about their literary lions.
Still, he was well placed to attempt an answer to the question: why were people willing to work for a regime which had been imposed by an invading army, was handing dissident fellow-citizens over to the Gestapo, and was sending large numbers of other fellow-citizens on train journeys to Poland from which they did not return.
He wheeled out the usual suspects. Some people wanted to continue their careers. Some had diplomatic or legal skills for which one’s own country’s government is the only plausible customer. Some, perhaps, genuinely wanted to serve the people, and believed that engagement rather than confrontation would get a better deal from the German occupiers.
After all services had to be kept up. Nobody blamed train drivers or postmen for continuing with their usual duties.
On the other hand being a government minister in an unsavoury regime still offered the same rewards in prestige and money which had attended pre-war ministers. Power can be addictive and, as Henry Kissinger observed, aphrodisiac.
This was a live issue when I first encountered Mr Peyrefitte. The Germans had invaded a wide variety of countries and rarely had any difficulty (if they tried) in finding locals who would fill government posts and do their bidding. It was suspected that this would have been true of England too if it had come to it.
After the war the individuals who had “collaborated” were disgraced and, often, shot. The plea that somebody had to keep the machinery working was rarely accepted. They should have known better.
No doubt there were arguments on both sides, and those of us who have never faced a dilemma of this kind should be wary of jumping to the conclusion that we would have identified what now seems with hindsight the right thing to do. But this issue, long forgotten in Europe, has now become an interesting question in Hong Kong, where some people now do face a choice of this kind.
In the 90s and noughties it was customary for people to explain their willingness to participate in joint activities with the Chinese government as a contribution to progress and an encouragement to the gradual transformation of a one-party dictatorship into something more tolerant and pluralistic.
Under ‘one country two systems’ Hong Kong was not required to import the well-known toxic features of public administration on the mainland, and its leaders were not to blame for abuses of power committed north of the boundary.
Unfortunately this will no longer wash. It is quite clear that the current regime in Beijing has no interest in progressing in the direction of tolerance and pluralism, still less freedom and democracy. And ‘one country two systems’ has proven a poor protection for local traditions.
So what do these people who cooperate on our behalf with the local representatives of despotism tell themselves about what they are doing? Is it possible to disregard the disappearances, the kidnappings, the shootings, the concentration camps, the censorship, the personality cult?
I understand the argument that patriotism requires citizens to support the government, whatever form that government takes, but this is a serious error. “My country right or wrong”, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, is no better than “my mother, drunk or sober”.
No doubt many of the People’s puppets in Hong Kong are too stupid or ambitious to worry about this, and many of the others prefer not to think about it. Certainly it is not much discussed.
Enter, the other week, Mr Bernard Chan. Mr Chan is the convenor of the Executive Council, a senior post once held by C.Y. Leung. He is, though, rather a contrast with his predecessor.
Mr Chan was born with a gold chopstick in his mouth (granddad founded the Bangkok Bank) and got a real degree from an expensive but otherwise splendid liberal arts college in California. He majored in Studio Arts, an interesting choice for someone who must already have suspected that he would be expected to inherit the family insurance business.
As he did, becoming in due course the insurance industry’s Legco representative and graduating from there to the National People’s Congress and more government advisory bodies than you can shake a stick at.
Mr Chan is clearly regarded by our colonial masters as a dependable cog in the imperial machinery. Yet he shares none of the objectionable features so common among his fellow-travellers. His public utterances are rare, but neither stupid nor venomous. He has a column in The Standard, an admirable hobby, but it is not devoted to political matters. It is mostly concerned with cultural activities and things you can do with your family at weekends.
Mr Chan appears to share the view expressed by Nigel Lawson in his monumental (or if you prefer grossly over-long) memoir of his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer: a man who writes about politics is missing out all the important things in life.
So it was nice of him to agree to a TV interview which, according to The Standard’s reporter, strayed into political territory. “Defending criticism that President Xi Jinping has concentrated power in his hands, Chan said it is not easy for a Beijing leader to manage a country of 1.3 billion people.”
And so “If you let all Chinese people behave the way they want to behave, I think China would be a very different place today. So I do think you need some sort of top-down approach. For now, it’s probably the best way for China, to assert their control or a certain direction from the top.”
Happily Mr Chan did not wish to see this extended to Hong Kong. But this, of course, raises the question: if allowing Chinese people in other places “to behave the way they want to behave” does not lead to dire consequences, why should it be a bad thing in China?
Mr Chan seems to have been lucky that his explanation did not attract as much attention as a rather similar remark from Jacky Chan a few years ago. It is not for me to protest on Chinese people’s behalf, but quite a lot of them were offended by the implication that they suffered from some genetic quirk which made them unfit for self-rule.
Clearly apologists for the Xi regime need a high degree of proficiency in the art of euphemism. There are a variety of ways of describing the brutal and authoritarian way in which China is governed, and “a certain direction from the top” doesn’t really capture the flavour fully.
But you have to wonder whether this really works inside the head of the person concerned. Are there moments of doubt at night, as in this song?
This is not an issue for the civil service in general. It really concerns those at some high level, though the responsibility Plimsoll Line comes, I fear, well below the Exco level.
Civil servants further down the pyramid of power can confort themselves with the thought that after all the trains still have to be driven, the post has to be delivered, and those who fulfil such practical needs are genuinely serving the people. Which some of them do very well.
My last official encounter with the civil service followed a minor accident on a hiking trail last year. I was passed with much kindness and efficiency from the Agriculture and Fisheries Department (country park rangers) to the Fire Services (ambulance) who delivered me to the Medical and Health people (Nethersole Hospital).
I know some people have had bad experiences in our over-burdened public hospitals but mine was entirely comparable with the highest international standards. See doctor, have X-ray, see doctor with specialist, painful but quick procedure (I had dislocated a finger), X-ray to see if procedure had worked and final discussion of same with doctor took about two hours and cost nothing.
There is usually a small charge for Accident and Emergency visits in Hong Kong but the hospital’s alert computer spotted that as the spouse of a retired civil servant I was entitled to a freebie, which surprised both of us.
So I think those who heal the sick, teach the young, sweep the streets and do other useful things have no need to be ashamed of the fact that somewhere up in the administrative stratosphere their bosses are taking orders from the Liaison Office.
What, on the other hand, are we to make of, for example, Carrie Lam’s insistence that Hong Kong’s lack of an extradition agreement with China has nothing to do with the fact that confidence in the mainland’s legal system (if you believe it has anything worth calling a legal system) is not high?
Is there an alternative explanation? Was it down to a moment of absent-mindedness, a translation glitch in the Joint Liaison Committee, a misprint? “I said China, not Ghana, you fool. Oh, never mind, It’s too late to change it now…”
Why do they keep telling us that ‘one country, two systems’ has been implemented “flawlessly”? After all even people who think that on the whole things have not gone badly would hardly put it so strongly.
It may be that this is trotted out simply on the parrot basis that it is the Beijing Foreign Office spokesman’s “line to take”.
But I suspect there is a deeper motive. If Hong Kong is still separate then those who roost in the legislative loft can still claim that what happens here has nothing to do with what happens there, and vice versa. Concentration camps? Nothing to do with us.
Which for the time being is probably OK. One must hope, though, that these people are giving some thought to where their limits are. The future is, to misquote Shakespeare, an “undiscovered country from which no traveller returns”. We do not know what is in store for us.
So it is a good idea to work out where your limits are, before you find you have been dragged over them without noticing it.
If you are still in the government’s team we must suppose you are OK with tear gas. What about live rounds? Dissidents jailed on antique legal charges? Well they’re criminals. Similar people spirited across the border to star on Confessiontube? What are you going to do if there’s blood on the street? Keep calm and Carrie on?
I felt a frisson of unease at a report in the Hong Kong Standard the other day about an accident in which a box of teargas fell out of the back of a Police Emergency Unit van. The newspaper reported that the van also contained sundry crowd control implements in case of need, including submachine guns. Machine guns?
tim's experiment 
It is fortunate that gross oratorical overkill is not a criminal offence, because it seems to have become a habit among our local policemen. The prize for the finest specimen must go to the Police Inspectors’ Association for their response to the first protest around the police HQ, which included this gem:
“This sword of extreme humiliation has already stabbed to the heart of every colleague, and each of us are grieved and heartbroken.” The association conceded that nobody had actually been injured. Inspectors, it seems, have sensitive feelings.
I would like to make it clear at this point that I have no personal quarrel with our police force, which in its dealings with me has always been polite, friendly, legal and even hospitable. On the one occasion when I thought I might need their help they were touchingly eager to provide it.
Any consideration of police matters in Hong Kong has to start from the point that our police people are wonderful, most of the time.
On the other hand (I have written this before) I have some doubts about the force’s insistence that it is a paramilitary organisation, and the resulting approach to public order problems.
It is not true that, as Mr Li Fei said the other day, protests in Hong Kong always descend into violence. Quite the contrary. Whatever you think about the claims for their size Hong Kong people manage to hold very large protests which are extremely orderly, even to the extent of clearing up the resulting litter afterwards.
On the other hand the events of June 12 were not the first time that a good deal of violence has occurred, and so much of it came from the police that the force was ordered to lay off the streets for a while. So you have to wonder: is the Star Wars gear a good look?
The desirability of a police force which sees itself in paramilitary terms is an on-going controversy. Some European countries have a separate paramilitary force, like the CRS in France or the Carabinieri in Italy. Others have special units in an otherwise ostentatiously civilian force, like the UK and Ireland.
The US has multiple police forces and policies vary. On the whole the paramilitary model is in bad odour there, not so much because of public order problems as because of the use of SWAT-type teams to conduct what they call “no-knock entries”: swift drug raids in the hope that a sufficiently brusque approach will prevent miscreants from flushing the evidence. In a country awash with guns this often produces dangerous situations.
Let us, though, start with a view of the paramilitary approach to public order problems from an American policeman, Mr Norman Stamper. His thoughts on the subject start with an arresting intro (sorry): “As Seattle police chief in 1999, my disastrous response to the WTO protests should have been a cautionary tale. Yet our police forces have only become more militarized…”
“The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of colour will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day…”
This is in an admirably brief version of the case against paramilitary policing: that it turns the police force into a separate tribe whose primary loyalty is to itself, that it results in an inappropriate approach to civilian protestors, and that this will eventually infect policing in general because of its effect on the way police perceive themselves and are perceived by other people.
Similar criticisms at book length can be found in a book by Tony Jefferson called “The case against paramilitary policing”. I cannot recommend this. It has compelling practical examples from the UK and Australia, but also a lot of post-modern Cultural Studies BS about hegemonic ideologies and such like.
Not all academics working in the area agree with Mr Jefferson. But plenty of them have come to similar conclusions.
Gillham and Marx, who studied the disorders in Ferguson, in the US, concluded that “Although increasing militarization provides protective equipment for police and superior force to potentially deter violent assaults against police or others, it can also reinforce feelings of fear and anger and the view that police are an occupying army rather than a public force that protects and serves its community. First Amendment [media] activities may be chilled, already damaged relations may be worsened, and police further delegitimized.”
Perry and others surveyed protestors who had participated in the “Occupy” movement in Israel in 2012, and found that “the perceived use of paramilitary methods has an independent and negative effect on trust, stronger than that of police effectiveness and the “neutrality” component of procedural justice. In‐depth interviews suggest that the significance of paramilitarism may be the … alienation and criminalization it elicits among protesters who generally perceive themselves as law‐abiding citizens.”
McCulloch studied policing in the State of Victoria, in Australia: “The research demonstrates that the Special Operations Group has been the harbinger of more military styles of policing involving high levels of confrontation, more lethal weapons and a greater range of weapons and more frequent recourse to deadly force….
“…the way public demonstrations and industrial disputes are viewed in police and security circles ensures that … counter terrorist tactics will be used to stifle dissent and protest. The move towards paramilitary policing is necessarily a move away from the police mandate to protect life, keep the peace and use only minimum force.”
Or here we have Cian Murphy on the situation in England and Ireland: “The effect of a squad system and quasi-military activity on police culture cannot be ignored. Police culture already suffers from machismo. Specialist paramilitary police sub-culture exacerbates this… The military model fosters the ‘we-them’ attitude, acts as a barrier to community relations, and promotes a warlike attitude.
“The effect is that these groups, generally deployed in hostile situations, view themselves as imposing peace, rather than fostering it. As one Brixtonian noted: ‘There’s a lot of boys, all psyched up…they want action’…
“Riot, it would seem, is prompted time and time again by police action… Police are ill equipped to act like soldiers: they do not have the luxury of seeing rioters as enemies; their role is to diffuse violence situations, not to engage in them. ‘Tooling-up’ dehumanises the police, making it easier for protestors to reconcile themselves with acting violently towards officers of the law.
“The sub-culture Jefferson observed in Special Patrol Groups was not unlike that of a military platoon patrolling a colony.”
Does that not sound a tiny bit familiar?
This brings us to the currently interesting question whether there should be some sort of inquiry into the events of June 12. Clearly the intention of some people calling for this is that such an inquiry would identify and condemn incidents in which the police had used force inappropriately or illegally.
This is no doubt also the reason some people are against it. We need not take very seriously the objection that there was violence from protestors as well. The individual protestor is not a government department. His responsibility for his actions is personal and legal. The police force is an organ of the government; the powers and actions of those who are authorised to carry and use lethal weapons on our behalf are a legitimate subject for public curiosity.
The idea that such an inquiry would be prejudiced against the police is also far-fetched. Work of this kind is usually entrusted to a senior judge. If there is any bias it will not be in that direction.
The point that some people seem to have trouble with is that there is not much point in going in great detail into what happened. I have no doubt that any inquiry which does this will conclude that everyone concerned on the side of order was either following the orders of a superior or exercising his discretion with the best intentions in the light of the equipment and training supplied and the doctrines established in the force.
On the other hand it can hardly be disputed that the outcome of the whole affair was less than ideal, particularly from the point of view of those injured or arrested. The number of people who were both injured and arrested is a bit disturbing. I cannot help recalling the case of the English PC who, on being told that the person he had arrested was not a rioter, replied over the radio (forgetting, no doubt, that such conversations are routinely recorded) “Well he’s going to have to be guilty of something because I’ve broken one of his teeth.”
The question which first arose during the tear gas festival which kicked off Occupy, and has now become more urgent, is whether the paramilitary model as presently followed is appropriate and necessary for Hong Kong.
Our police force has an unusual arrangement in that virtually all police people do the same special course at some point in their first three years in the force, and many of them do it again later. The course is an explicitly militaristic affair and would be an admirable preparation for the sort of riots which Hong Kong used to have in the 60s.
But having everyone do it means the military spirit pervades the force. Teamwork is a fine thing, but tribalism can be taken to excesses. It is noticeable that in none of the rare cases in which a police person is accused of using excessive or inappropriate force do we see a police person as a prosecution witness. Loyalty to colleagues trumps loyalty to the law.
Or indeed to anything else. The loyal toast “to the Queen” which used to be a part of formal regimental dinners had to be replaced after the handover. It was not replaced by a toast to the PRC or the SAR or their respective heads. The toast is now to “the Hong Kong Police Force”.
In defence of the current arrangements it is argued that the police have to have their own anti-riot (or Internal Security, as the euphemism has it) arrangements because unlike their counterparts in larger political units they have no neighbours they can call on for reinforcements.
Unstated, but no doubt not unthought, is also the point that unlike their colonial predecessors they cannot call on the support of British troops. Nobody wants to see what the PLA’s version of crowd control would look like.
Still, I think the point that needs to be examined is whether the undoubted need can be met without wholesale recourse to a police model which is generally assessed as lying somewhere between perilous and toxic. Being paramilitary seems to be an article of faith. Consequently no thought is given to the possibility of avoiding its less desirable features, still less to the attractions of changing to a civilian model and keeping pepper spray as a last resort.
I suppose there is some discussion of these matters behind the scenes. It is noticeable that after the shock and awe approach has failed we see experiments with more soothing methods like negotiation and deploying lots of lady cops.
This debate should take place in public. Policing is too important to be left to police people.
It is also too important to be left to the officials nominally in charge. Their reactions to June 12 did not inspire confidence. The Secretary for Security’s answer to questions about police people not displaying numbers on their uniforms was that the Star Wars kit did not have room for a numberplate. This was both irrelevant and untrue.
Meanwhile the chairman of the supposedly independent body which reviews the way complaints against the police are handled (the actual handling is done by the police themselves) said that they had not deployed observers for any of the recent protest marches or demonstrations because they were so big it would be impossible to see everything.
This is like the director of the Observatory deciding not to do typhoon warnings because typhoons are big and unpredictable. Not seeing everything is surely preferable to not seeing anything. Unless, of course, you do not wish to see anything…