Editor's Note: Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The dramatic Hong Kong Polytechnic University crisis was pure provocation by foreign-influenced radicals meant to revive the violent protest movement by inciting the city's police into taking drastic action against them.  But it's a trap that law enforcement representatives avoided through their world-class display of professionalism.

Instead of reacting like how many of their peers elsewhere would have done under similar circumstances, the police chose to respond in a very calm manner and with utmost caution.

The Hong Kong police are aware that those rioters have been indoctrinated by foreign forces, and while that doesn't absolve those who committed crimes of their guilt, it made the authorities realize that not all of the participants were in their right mind.

Furthermore, they're also fellow residents of Hong Kong, which is another reason why the police didn't want to resort to using forcible measures that would have been completely justified had they absolutely needed to do so.

That in and of itself debunks the foreign media's agenda-driven "reporting" about the crisis, which manufactured the narrative that a bloodbath was about to ensue as the sole result of the police's supposedly impending crackdown.

There was certainly a lot of destruction that occurred, but that was due to the rioters and had nothing to do with the police's reaction to their provocation. Instead of biting the bait, the authorities stayed back and let events naturally unfold, which ultimately saw the crisis run out of steam on its own.

This wise approach gave the comparatively "moderate" rioters who got involved in the situation the opportunity to peacefully surrender, which many of them did after realizing the hopelessness of what they were trying to achieve.

Had they soberly thought about the crisis that they were starting in advance, they'd have realized the impossibility of a group of rioters holding their city of over seven million people hostage and getting the government to submit to their illegal demands out of desperation to defuse the crisis.

The foreign forces and their local cadre of collaborators who encouraged the rioters to spark the crisis and carry it on for as long as they did are fully responsible for everything that happened as a result. They seemingly intended for people to get killed in order to then portray some of the fallen rioters as "martyrs" for re-energizing their political crusade, which was doomed from the get-go but didn't seem so to those who had been indoctrinated by foreign influences into thinking otherwise.

On the other hand, the professionalism of the Hong Kong police is responsible for why the crisis didn't escalate, and it also shows that law enforcement representatives don't have a "bloodlust" like some foreign media have claimed. The weaponized information warfare narrative that the police are "oppressing innocent citizens" was discredited for the entire world to see by the very fact that the police were responsible for preventing bloodshed, not causing it.

That doesn't mean that they didn't have the right to more forcibly respond to the situation, but just that they decided not to at this time for the reasons that were explained. The Chinese people are united as one, which includes both regular folks and those who work with the state. Unless there's no other way to resolve a security crisis, the police will always attempt to do so as peacefully as possible because no patriotic citizen wants to harm their compatriots.

While some foreign media are attempting to portray the Hong Kong Polytechnic University crisis as a "heroic struggle" by a bunch of "freedom fighters," it was actually a genuinely heroic struggle fought by Hong Kong residents who volunteered to protect the rule of law in their city by becoming police officers. This is obvious to anyone who objectively assesses what transpired across the course of this crisis, and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world realizes it.

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