Legitimization & de-legitimization of police: In British colonial & Chinese SAR Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Police have been regarded as ‘Asia’s Finest’ law enforcement unit for its professional outlook since the 1980s. It was gradually transformed to a ‘well-organized’, ‘efficient’ and ‘less corrupted’ police force before the sovereignty retrocession to China in 1997. However, there has been increasingly public frustration over its professionalism, neutrality, and competence of individual officers, accompanied by political vehemence emerging from controversies of electoral reforms since the 2010s. Rather than the ‘politicization of society’ and the ‘institutional decay of the police’, this paper argues the phenomenon could be explained by the abrupt and fundamental change of policing context accompanied by the realignment of Beijing’s Hong Kong policy under the One Country Two Systems framework since 2014. Copyright © 2020 Organization for Regional and Inter-regional Studies (ORIS), Waseda University.