Chinese students flee Hong Kong as campus turns into a battlefield
POLICE in Hong Kong were forced to evacuate a university campus of students from mainland China after it became the site of a second day of violent anti-beijing demonstrations.
Marine officers used a boat to rescue students at their request from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where police say protesters shot arrows dipped in petrol and lit on fire, and even used electric saws to target officers.
Protesting students in Hong Kong have added javelins, bows and arrows, bricks and petrol bombs to their arsenal as they clash with police armed with tear gas, water cannons and live bullets, in violent standoffs now spilling into university campuses. Last night, the CUHK campus remained barricaded by protesters preparing for more skirmishes.
The flare-ups came after officers shot a protester at close range on Monday, while police have claimed “rioters” doused a man with petrol and set him on fire in some of the worst violence so far.
“Rioters’ violence reached a very dangerous and even deadly level,” Tse Chun-chung, a police spokesman, told a media briefing yesterday. “Nowhere in Hong Kong is a lawless land.”
Protests – now in their sixth month – have plunged Hong Kong into its worst political crisis in a direct challenge to the authority of Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. What started as opposition against an extradition proposal has since morphed into a broader anti-china movement.
Mainland students have posted online about being targeted by protesters breaking into their dormitories and spray-painting expletives, Chinese media reported. Some organisations in neighbouring Shenzhen are now offering free accommodation for students who want to leave Hong Kong.
The campus clashes this week have drawn outcry, but police defended their actions at CUHK because they had a “strong suspicion that the school was used as a weapon factory” as hundreds of petrol bombs were thrown at the institution, said Mr Tse.
“A university is supposed to be a breeding ground for future leaders, but it became a battlefield for criminals and rioters,” he added.
Jacky So, the president of CUHK’S student union, has applied for an interim injunction to ban police from entering the campus without a warrant, and from using crowd control weapons on site without school approval.
Yesterday, protesters – many of whom are students – built barricades on busy roads, blocked commuters and vandalised trains, causing much of the public transport system to shut down. Protesters also set fire to buses and petrol stations, police said.
In the city’s central business district, police used an armoured vehicle with an officer firing less-than-lethal rounds from the roof to ram a barricade and disperse protesters blocking traffic.
Earlier in the day, about 1,000 protesters blocked roads in the district at lunchtime. Wearing banned face masks and dressed in office wear, they marched and hurled bricks on to roads lined with some of the world’s most expensive real estate and luxury stores.
Scores of riot police tried to disperse the crowds near the stock exchange, wrestling some people to the ground and beating others with batons.
The Chinese government’s liaison office in Hong Kong warned this week that the city was “slipping into the abyss of terrorism”.
Protests escalated after student Chow Tsz-lok, 22, died last week from injuries sustained from a fall under unclear circumstances while police were clearing protesters.