Lights, camera, action! HK police drama is a hit
LATE at night, police cars speed by with flashing warning lights in the streets of Hong Kong. “Stand by! Go! Go! Go!” Officers armed with submachine guns and wearing bulletproof vests raid the stronghold of terrorists and smash their plots.
Rather than from any action movie, the tense scene is part of the latest promotional video of the Hong Kong police.
In the 15-minute video titled “Guarding Our City,” the story follows the police force defeating a group of terrorists who take residents hostage and place a powerful bomb in an oil depot to force the police to release their leader.
With 100 million views and many likes, the production went viral online, and the attractiveness largely stems from its authenticity.
Except for those playing foreign terrorists, all the actors are serving officers. Some 600 officers from over 15 units took part in the filming, including Commissioner of Police Chris Tang Ping-keung who plays a front-line officer.
The “Flying Tigers,” Hong Kong’s elite police squad carrying out special missions, landing on the rooftop of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, armed divers silently slipping to the attack position underwater, and explosive disposal experts removing and detonating a bomb: None of the scenes have stunt performers or special effects.
Chan Kin-kwok, the commandant of the Police Tactical Unit, actually plays himself in the video, assisting the command of the operation.
The PTU holds anti-riot and anti-terrorist drills every year and “once there is a terrorist attack, I will assist the superior officer to deal with the crisis, just like what I do in the video,” he said.
The video is the latest effort by the police to get rid of the negative image due to rumors spread during social unrest in 2019.
As the impact from the smears and slanders by rioters linger, the chief superintendent of police public relations branch Kwok Ka-chuen said it is still an important task to win trust and support from ordinary people.
Kwok and his team started to livestream police operations and also violent acts of rioters as early as November 2019 to improve transparency.
The police also held more than 500 press conferences last year and gave some 150 interviews to dispel misunderstandings. Tang, the police chief, gave over 30 exclusive interviews himself.
Viewers of the promotional video have cheered officers online, with encouraging comments such as “Thanks for safeguarding Hong Kong,” “Well done!” and “Officers did a good job in fighting ‘black violence.’”
“Hong Kong is our home. I hope the public can trust the police more and join hands with us to maintain the peace of home,” Kwok said.
BITCOIN hit a market capitalization of US$1 trillion as it rose to yet another record high on Friday, countering analyst warnings that it is an “economic side show” and a poor hedge against a fall in stock prices.
The world’s most popular cryptocurrency jumped to an all-time high of US$56,399.99, posting a weekly gain of 14 percent. It has surged nearly 70 percent so far this month and was last up 8 percent at US$55,664.
Bitcoin’s gains have been fueled by signs it is gaining acceptance among mainstream investors and companies, from Tesla Inc and Mastercard Inc to BNY Mellon .
All digital coins combined have a market cap of around US$1.7 trillion.
“If you really believe there’s a store of value in bitcoin, then there’s still a lot of upside,” said John Wu, president of AVA Labs, an open-source platform for creating financial applications using blockchain technology.
“If you look at gold, it has a market cap of US$9 or US$10 trillion. Even if bitcoin gets to half of gold’s market cap, that’s still growth of 4X, or US$200,000. So I don’t know when it stops rising,” he added.
The next milestone will be overtaking Alphabet Inc, currently valued at US$1.431 trillion, said Jacob Skaaning, portfolio manager at crypto hedge fund ARK36.
“There will likely be some big fluctuations along the way, but I’m still very bullish and I believe the uptrend will continue for the time being,” he added.
Still, many analysts and investors remain skeptical of the patchily regulated, highly volatile digital asset, which is little used for commerce.
Economic changes
Analysts at JP Morgan said bitcoin’s current prices were well above estimates of fair value. Mainstream adoption increases bitcoin’s correlation with cyclical assets, which rise and fall with economic changes, in turn reducing benefits of diversifying into crypto, the investment bank said in a memo.
“Crypto assets continue to rank as the poorest hedge for major drawdowns in equities, with questionable diversification benefits at prices so far above production costs, while correlations with cyclical assets are rising as crypto ownership is mainstreamed,” JP Morgan said.
Bitcoin is an “economic side show,” it added, calling innovation in financial technology and the growth of digital platforms into credit and payments “the real financial transformational story of the COVID-19 era.”
Bitcoin would need to rise to US$146,000 in the long-term for its market cap to equal the total private-sector investment in gold via exchange-traded funds or bars and coins, according to JP Morgan.