PUBLISHED ONJanuary 17, 2023 5:06 AMByKhoo Yi-HangA list of police officers and their photos was released by US activist group Xinjiang Victims Database (XVD) on Twitter on Jan 6, detailing some of the people said to have been a part of the controversial clampdown on the Uighurs.
And while the subject matter itself is a serious point of debate, netizens have noted a strange sight on the contact sheet of 'crackdown' cops — movie megastars Andy Lau, 61 and Chow Yun Fat, 67, are also on it.
"Just when did Andy and Yun Fat go to Xinjiang to become police officers?" one user on Twitter asked.
Another said: "Popular Hong Kong actors Andy Lau and Chow Yun Fat have magically dropped their lucrative careers to become Xinjiang police officers!"
A few users also felt that fellow Hong Kong cinema legend Jackie Chan would feel "left out".
"Jackie must be heartbroken for the Police Story [fans]," one user stated. "Andy Lau and Chow Yun Fat, please console your peer. He deserves his rightful spot [on the list]."
All three actors have had roles as police officers before. Jackie was in the hit movie series Police Story (1985 - 2013), Andy had a role in the iconic Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002) while Yun Fat was in Hard Boiled (1992).
And while this blunder might have cast doubts on the legitimacy of the list, the activist group has offered an explanation as to why the movie stars have appeared on the list.
The source of the identities and photographs used in the list was from a 2021 cache that have "seen its validity corroborated 1000s of times over in practice", XVD stated on Twitter.
The data in the cache is presented as a long string of text that has to be decoded, and it isn't immediately apparent what image will turn up from the text.
The group said that although the cache contains officers' "IDs, phone numbers, units and… corresponding photos… Most don't have photos, and photos aren't always of themselves".
"Although we had a programmer run a script to pull out all the pictures with faces and trim them as needed, manually filtering out non-real photos afterwards, we did miss a couple," they explained.
Another user empathised with their plight and also suggested: "These are internal Urumqi police databases. The police officers with photographs of famous actors as their profile image uploaded the image themselves."
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