A fierce online argument has been unfolding over whether Dalian’s female mounted police should continue to exist at all. The immediate trigger was simple enough: a retired police officer asked for the cost of maintaining the unit’s horses to be made public. That request itself is entirely reasonable. The public has a right to know how government money is spent, and official transparency is supposed to be encouraged. If people raise doubts, disclosing the actual expenses should not be difficult.
But once the discussion was steered away from cost disclosure and toward whether the mounted police should be abolished, it became a different controversy altogether. At that point, it was no longer only about public oversight. It also raised another question: were people truly concerned about saving public money, or was the topic being redirected so that attention would shift away from the original issue of horse-keeping costs?
Officials then released the figures. Most of the horses, it was explained, came from retired racehorses donated by the Hong Kong Jockey Club. The horses themselves were not purchased, but keeping one costs 2,500 yuan per month. That number quickly became the center of online criticism. Many people argued that spending 2,500 yuan every month on a horse was impractical, and that the mounted police were nothing more than decoration.
I do not agree with that view.
The cost argument is too narrow
Police need transportation. If horses were not used, then motorcycles or patrol cars would have to be used instead, and both come with maintenance costs of their own. Motorcycles may be cheaper, but cars are certainly more expensive to maintain than a horse. Looked at that way, 2,500 yuan a month for a horse is hardly an outrageous figure.
The criticism also ignores where these mounted officers actually work. Dalian’s female mounted police do not patrol the whole city the way traffic police do. They are mainly stationed in heavily touristed public areas such as People’s Square and Xinghai Square. These are places with dense pedestrian traffic and large open plazas, environments that are not especially suitable for cars. Horses can move through such spaces more naturally and more effectively.
A mounted officer is still a police officer
The most misleading argument is the one that reduces them to an ornament because they ride horses. A mounted policewoman is first and foremost a police officer. Riding a horse does not cancel her law-enforcement role. The deterrent effect is still real. To dismiss the entire unit as a mere display is to ignore the basic fact that they still perform policing functions.
There is also a broader urban context that should not be forgotten. Dalian is a tourist city. In 2012, its tourism revenue reached 76.7 billion yuan. Cities do not attract that kind of income by accident. They do so because they have a character and appeal that other places do not. The female mounted police are part of that appeal. If the issue is viewed strictly in economic terms, their horses are not some meaningless expense. Their contribution to the city is not trivial, and calling the return “negligible” does not fit the reality of a tourism-oriented city.
Public spending has to be judged in proportion
For a city the size of Dalian, annual horse-related spending in the range of a million yuan is not especially large. Cities often spend tens of millions, even more than a hundred million, on temporary floral displays for major meetings or National Day celebrations. Against that backdrop, the mounted police budget is hardly extraordinary.
And the mounted police base itself is also a Class AAA tourist attraction. It is hard to believe that a tourism site built around the mounted police would bring in less than a million yuan a year. That does not mean every public institution should be measured only by direct financial return, but it does show how simplistic it is to treat the unit as a pure drain on resources.
Their function is not limited to patrol work
Another flaw in the criticism is that it judges the mounted police only from the perspective of patrol efficiency. Their role is broader than that. They also serve ceremonial, security, performance, and cultural functions. To declare them useless because one chooses to look at just one part of their work is a one-sided judgment.
If that logic were applied consistently, then military honor guards could also be scrapped, the national flag guards in Tiananmen could also be scrapped, and cheer squads at sporting events could also be scrapped. Once everything is judged only by the narrowest standard of immediate utility, many public symbols and institutions would be dismissed as unnecessary. But societies do not run on stripped-down efficiency alone.
The deeper problem is how opinion gets guided
People will always disagree, and being able to express those disagreements openly is a sign of social progress. But when the public only repeats what is being said without making its own judgment, that same progress can turn into a problem.
Another case has been making waves online at the same time. A middle school student from Nanjing, Ding Jinhao, carved the all-too-familiar phrase “I was here” at Luxor Temple in Egypt while traveling there. Afterward, his parents said they wanted to apologize to the relevant Egyptian authorities. Yet even that apology became controversial. Some people argued that apologizing would damage China’s dignity. Others angrily attacked those who condemned the graffiti, calling them lackeys of foreigners and examples of blind worship of the West.
This is what makes the spread of misguided opinion so dangerous. When a wrong way of framing an issue travels quickly and is accepted by people who do not stop to think, large numbers of people end up taking the wrong side of an event. And when that framing is not accidental but deliberately encouraged by certain people, the consequences can be far worse.
The most troubling part is that such distortions often arrive dressed in moral language. They present themselves as righteous, patriotic, or principled. That disguise makes the damage more lasting, because once false judgment starts posing as virtue, it becomes much harder to challenge.