Police Chief Chris Tang Ping-keung on Tuesday condemned the attack by a group of at least eight black-clad people on security guards at the Chinese University of Hong Kong the day before. He said a student from the university had been arrested for his alleged involvement in the attack. The attack on the campus security guards who were merely doing their job, causing injury to one of the guards who had to be sent to hospital for treatment, must have saddened many in Hong Kong. The incident not only reminded them of the terrifying violent rampages that plagued the city for months in 2019 but also once again drew their attention to the cold fact that quite a few of our young people have no qualms about demonstrating reckless disregard for — indeed contempt for — the law. 

Even more depressing is the fact that some of these unruly young people are students from our elite universities, who are supposed to be more competent intellectually and more capable of appreciating the importance of upholding the rule of law, a cornerstone of Hong Kong’s prosperity.  

When even some of our students from elite universities demonstrated reckless disregard for the law, it was really no wonder that the president of the Law Society of Hong Kong, Melissa Kaye Pang, questioned “whether Hong Kong people truly understand what the rule of law is” during her speech at the ceremonial opening of the legal year on Monday, noting that some “eminent legal practitioners and scholars” had promoted the notion that obedience of the law is not necessary for the rule of law.

Indeed, political demagogues like Benny Tai Yiu-ting have contributed significantly to the wrong or distorted understanding of the rule of law. To promote their political agendas, the demagogues overemphasized the importance of restraining state power while deliberately downplaying the other equally important side of the rule of law, namely the need for citizens to respect and abide by the law and to exercise rights and freedoms within the boundaries of the law. 

Arguably, many young people’s reckless disregard, or contempt, for the law, as demonstrated by the black-clad attackers in Monday’s incident and during the violent rampages in the second half of 2019, was the result of persistent pernicious indoctrination by those political demagogues who have promoted toxic notions such as “achieving justice by breaking the law”.

For the sake of Hong Kong’s prosperity and residents’ well-being, it is hoped that the distorted understanding of the concept of “rule of law” among many Hong Kong residents, particularly the youth, will be rectified without delay by the judiciary under the leadership of Chief Justice Andrew Cheung Kui-nung.