Hong Kong Murders and the Movies
Friday 3 November 2006
Hong Kong cinema is world famous for it's gun crazed, bullet ridden shoot 'em up action movies, in which coultless fictional characters are murdered in the most gruesome ways. A vast B-movie industry has grown out of the territories reputation for gangster style murders and sensational court cases.
Are the action flicks a fair reflection on reality though? Hong Kong is a city of 7 million people and in fact, it has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. The last decade has seen a significant drop in murders, with 102 in 1997 and just 34 last year.
This low figure is in part due to the migration of some of the city's gang activity to southern China. However, recent years have seen some very high profile cases that have no gang land connections. Take the case of Nancy Kissel. She was an American expat who was convicted of murdering her husband, who was a banker. She drugged his milkshake and then bludgeoned him to death. Hong Kong's media went into a frenzy over the case.
However, back in 2002, if you'd have been at the Luk Yu Tea House, you could be forgiven for thinking you were on the set of a gangster movie, as a diner paid his bill, walked over to the Hong Kong property Tycoon Harry Lam and shot him in the head. With the trial in Shenzhen now nearing an end, Yang Wen, the accused shooter has apparently admitted to the killing. Reading just like the script from a classic Hong Kong movie, details of envelopes containing pictures of the victim/target, large amounts of money changing hands, assassins being delivered etc all emerged.
However, in reality, crimes like this happen all too often around the world and as the Hong Kong crime figures suggest, most of Hong Kong's murders only happen in the movies.
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