Then & Now | Hong Kong’s refusal to order 2016 riot inquiry, and what it means for the city
Public inquiries into major incidents – to establish what went wrong and lessons learned – have been routine; the failure to order one after Mong Kok violence shows officials don’t want to hear answers to honest questions
At various times in Hong Kong’s past, when typhoons, floods or landslides occurred, an official commission of inquiry was immediately ordered. The same response followed ferry disasters, tunnel collapses and other calamities, especially when they involved significant injury or loss of life, and where quantifiable human error might have been responsible.
A similar approach was followed when long-simmering socio-economic or political unrest boiled over into street violence. A commission of inquiry, with members selected to be – at least superficially – impartial and objective, was swiftly convened, with orders to get to the bottom of what had happened.
This sequence of events repeated with each of the three significant outbreaks of politically fomented violence that occurred in Hong Kong after the second world war; the Nationalist-caused 1956 Kowloon disturbances, the 1966 Star Ferry fracas and, most significantly, the 1967 Communist-orchestrated mayhem that left more than 50 people dead and hundreds injured, through street violence, bombings and arson.
Outwardly, the main functions of these inquiries were to dispassionately document and evaluate the immediate and more general causes of the unrest, and the strengths and shortcomings of the official response to them. The aim was to determine what could be done better, or differently, should similar circumstances arise in the future.
Eventual opening up to public scrutiny of official files in Hong Kong, Britain and elsewhere, and additional revelations in interviews, memoirs and other first-hand accounts, afford a different historical perspective to what, over time, has become generally “understood” to have happened.
