It was August 31 yesterday, another date seared into Hong Kongers’ brains. On the night of August 31 last year, an army of fully armed riot police rushed into the platforms and railway carriages at the Prince Edward MTR Station to carry out random attacks on ordinary citizens in the name of “driving away and arresting” protesters around Prince Edward. Following the 7.21 Yuen Long incident, 8.31 is another collective trauma that reinforces Hong Kongers’ hatred of the police. In terms of ins and outs, however, 8.31 is even more evil than 7.21. After all, as to the latter, the bunch of “white-gloved lackeys” who attacked were ruffians. Though the police have been suspected of mollycoddling and even conniving with them, the force has been “behind the scene”(despite showing the cloven hoof once in a while due to poor acting) all the way through. As to 8.31, the police, fed by tax payers and supposed to serve Hong Kongers, did anew by themselves what the white-shirted ruffians had done on July 21 last year - indiscriminately assaulting ordinary citizens. While the police were engaged in malpractice, lying and denial of justice at most on July 21, they were terrorists through and through on August 31. The two incidents are two thorns in Hong Kongers’ flesh. As long as they are not sincerely and fairly settled by the regime, Hong Kongers will still abhor the force.

Regarding the widely circulated stories on the internet about “people beaten to death on August 31”, I , as a journalist, am obliged to treat it as a rumor because there has been no irrefutable evidence found thus far. That being said, even if no one was killed that day, it does not change the evil nature of the incident. Nevertheless, the eyes of the masses were fixed on how the people stranded inside the station were arbitrarily attacked. They were just lucky if they survived. A disciplined service responsible for protecting the citizens randomly assaulting the latter is itself a heinous crime. Whether the death toll is zero or an integer is only a matter of degree, but not the crux of concluding the conviction.

To consolidate the sequence of events of 8.31, I do not believe the directive given to the police officers was “go into the station to beat up citizens”. Why were the policemen collectively runaway inside the station, pepper-spraying and clubbing passers-by at random without forethought? This is apparently attributed to the fact that the police had been immune for months from liability for their brutality against protesters, reporters and civilians, and sheltered time and again by government officials. Being accustomed to it and in a state of frenzy, they saw only “cockroaches”(protesters) inside the station and after all, there was no harm in beating them up. To get down to the bedrock, the root cause of 8.31 is the police, immune from liability for wrongdoings, were not checked and balanced.

That being so, how come the police were not checked and balanced? The answer touches upon another 8.31 incident. On August 31, 2014, a decision had passed at the National People’s Congress(NPC) Standing Committee to deny the genuine dual universal suffrage in 2016 and 2017. Such a decision had concluded that after 2017,，the SAR led by the chief executive would still be accountable only to the Chinese Communist Part, which would have votes, but not Hong Kong people, who would not. Such a decision had enabled Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, who was elected the Chief Executive in 2017, to wilfully submit herself to the “imperial edicts”, defying the opinion of 2 million people to force through the Extradition Amendment Bill. Such a decision had made the event unmanageable by pushing Lam, who was unable to resolve the public grievances, to let the police loose on cracking down on Hong Kong people in a bid to conserve her governance. To this end, monitoring for the police, including officers producing warrant cards and showing assigned numbers, had been gone in no time. As a result, the regime was not checked and balanced, nor were the police. An unconfined regime can only conserve its authority that is not legitimized by the people through clamping down on resistants with unrestricted violence.

A regime to which free rein is given will not have a contained police force. As such, incidents like 8.31 are bound to occur. In Hong Kong, all of these stemmed from the 8.31 decision passed at the NPC to deny the genuine universal suffrage. That is how the two 8.31s were connected. Had there not been the first one, the next one might not have happened. If we want to establish the facts of the second 8.31, the first 8.31 has to be reversed.

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