Hong Kong University Under Siege By Police, Protesters Fear Violent Chinese Crackdown

A “small band of anti-government protesters,” holed up in Hong Kong Polytechnic University, are still refusing to give into police demands, even as Hong Kong authorities’ siege of the demonstrators’ stronghold enters its eleventh day and the number of remaining protesters is dwindling rapidly.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement also says that it fears an imminent crackdown from authorities at the behest of Chinese government, which wants a swift and decisive end to the five-month-long movement.

The Guardian reports that there are still about 100 individuals holed up in Hong Kong Polytechnic, the final stronghold of a university movement that began last week following an uptick in violence between pro-democracy protesters and Hong Kong’s police. Thousands of students, determined to move the pro-democracy movement forward, wrote a manifesto demanding that the Chinese loosen their grip on Hong Kong’s government and abandon efforts to stifle the freedoms residents of the city-state enjoy, and gathered in universities last week and prepared to either negotiate with Hong Kong’s chief executive or do battle with law enforcement.

“On five campuses in the Chinese-ruled territory, students armed with medieval-type weaponry turned their universities into rebel fortresses, amid a growing sense by many that sustained peaceful protests were futile. On the other side of the barricades and beyond the flames of burning debris were lines of riot police, armed with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets,” according to Reuters.

They were able to hunker down in safety for three days before police closed in. Now, after a weekend marked with violence, only the group at Hong Kong Polytechnic is left, now facing arrest and an unknown future as Hong Kong’s government has refused to give in to their demands.

“Running battles between police and protesters on Monday featured raging fires, tear gas and flaming vehicles,” Bloomberg said from the scene. “By the evening tens of thousands of demonstrators marched toward the university to aid those stuck in the campus, leading to more clashes throughout the night. Some managed to leave from the university in Kowloon by climbing over walls, while police arrested dozens of others on Monday — sometimes tackling them to the ground or pounding them with batons.”

“Several groups have tried to escape, including one that slid down hoses from a footbridge to waiting motorcycles, but police said they intercepted 37, including the drivers, who were arrested for ‘assisting offenders,'” Reuters reported Tuesday.

“Late on Monday, dozens were seen abseiling down a footbridge as police fired teargas, and were driven away on motorbikes,” the Guardian added. Several others were intercepted trying to escape through underground drainage tunnels.

Chinese state-run media says that around a thousand people have been arrested over the course of the confrontation, including perhaps 300 minors (though China’s media would not acknowledge the age of many of the protesters). Overnight, around 600 people either surrendered or were “evacuated” from Hong Kong Polytechnic alone.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, was unsympathetic in a speech Tuesday morning.

“We will use whatever means to continue to persuade and arrange for these remaining protesters to leave the campus as soon as possible so that this whole operation could end in a peaceful manner,” she told reporters, later adding that she believed that protesters had turned their universities into “weapons factories,” thus necessitating the police response.

Pro-democracy protests, triggered by a bill in the city-state’s legislature that would have allowed Chinese authorities to seek out and apprehend political dissidents hiding out in Hong Kong, have been going on for more than five months. In recent weeks, though, the protests have escalated, as demonstrators use increasingly violent means to get attention, and Hong Kong officials, prompted by the Chinese government, crack down in increasingly violent ways.