‘HONG KONG HAS GONE CRAZY’
Pro-democracy protests turn violent as police unleash tear gas.
Hong Kong • In a significant escalation of their efforts to suppress protests calling for democracy, the authorities in Hong Kong unleashed tear gas, mobilized riot police with long-barrelled guns and closed a subway station Sunday to disperse crowds that have besieged the city government for three days. But thousands of residents wielding only umbrellas and face masks defied police orders to clear the area.
Hours after the police sought to break up the protest, large crowds of demonstrators remained nearby, sometimes confronting lines of officers and chanting for them to lay down their truncheons and shields. Police officers also were injured in skirmishes with protesters. Streets of a city known as a safe enclave for commerce became a nighttime battleground.
Steve Lee, 23, a recent university graduate who joined the protest, sobbed on the sidewalk after exposure to tear gas.
“I don’t understand how the government can, in less than 30 seconds after a warning, use tear gas against peaceful student protesters,” he said.
“Hong Kong has gone crazy,” he added. “It is no longer the Hong Kong I know, or the world knows.”
Some protest leaders called on students to retreat, citing fears that the police would use rubber bullets on the crowd. The Hong Kong government said the police warned residents to “leave peacefully and in an orderly manner, otherwise officers would use a higher level of force.”
The police issued a statement Sunday evening saying that a “lockdown” had been imposed on several downtown areas, including the vicinity of the central government’s offices, and declared any assembly near the offices “unlawful.” Officials reported 78 arrests.
But late into the night, many thousands of residents remained on the streets, denouncing the police crackdown and staging sit-ins in several neighbourhoods outside the original protest area. The crowd was especially dense around the Admiralty neighbourhood near government headquarters, where the mayhem first broke out earlier in the day and the police ordered a subway stop closed.
Many protesters said they were incensed by how the police had abruptly broken up the sit-in outside the headquarters.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, never imagined it,” said Kevin Chan, 48, a factory manager. “The government must awaken that this is the Hong Kong people here,” he said, gesturing to the crowd, mostly made up of people in their 20s. “These are not their enemies, these are the people.”
Many of the younger protesters wore surgical masks, goggles and clear plastic wrap over their eyes.