Heroine of the hour

There was an interesting photo-story on the ChinaSmack news site over the weekend about an off-duty policewoman in the city of Changchun who saved the life of a young girl threatening suicide. The policewoman was apparently just driving by the scene where the girl was threatening to throw herself off the top of a tall building. Police units were gathering already, but were perhaps unsure how to proceed (I don't suppose they get much training in this kind of thing; and, from the photos, it doesn't look as if there were any other female officers on the scene). So the heroine decided to intervene, going up on the rooftop to try to talk the girl down - and then grabbing her arm and hanging on to her as she tried to slip over the edge.

It's interesting that nearly all of the Chinese commenters on this story, while warmly praising the bravery and compassion of the officer, place it in the context of the generally dismal reputation the police have here - "what a pleasant change to find an officer we can admire, for once!"

The other common trend in responses is to extravagantly praise the young police officer's supposed beauty. Well, all things are relative, I suppose. I don't wish to be ungallant about this, and I am as full of admiration for her conduct in this incident as the next bod, but..... well, I wouldn't call her unattractive, but I found her looks fairly unremarkable. "Pretty" for a police officer, perhaps. Or for Changchun - capital of Jilin province in China's north-east 'rust belt', noted for its brutal winters and not much else. But a dazzling beauty? No, I missed that.

There's a quaint mixture of hyperbole and tweeness in the Chinese response to incidents such as this. It took some time for the young policewoman's name to emerge, and during this interval Netizens nicknamed her "Most Beautiful Police Flower". Flower??!!

Ah, well, in 'the West' I suppose we would have dubbed her "a uniformed hottie" - or worse. Diffrent strokes, and all that.

Do go and check out the story.