Hong Kong has fallen into recession as tourists have fled and as its busy shopping areas become backdrops for street battles between demonstrators and police officers. The world is asking hard questions about what could befall Hong Kong as Beijing further tightens control over a city that is supposed to operate under its own laws.
The most dramatic student-versus-police clash unfolded late Tuesday night at a barricaded bridge leading to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For hours, police officers fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and students hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks, and practiced firing bows with flaming arrows. More than 100 injured students were brought to a makeshift first-aid clinic in a gym.
By targeting campuses, the police have breached the last refuge of the protesters, a move that brings the violence to the heart of the universities and invokes the pivotal and fraught role of student activism in the global history of democracy movements.
“One thing that people have realized is that the protests, the movement, the conflict, is unavoidable,” Gabriel Fung, a 19-year-old second-year student at the University of Hong Kong, said. “It’s going to reach you wherever you are at some point.”
It is at these universities where young leaders and other students have been organizing revolts against the Chinese Communist Party and spreading the pro-democracy ideas that undergird the protests. And here, too, that the students discuss the wealth inequality and cultural homogenization that have led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation.
In Hong Kong, university administrators and professors now find themselves in a difficult position, trying to preach tolerance and walk a tightrope of furious demands from students, the police and government officials. Two schools on Wednesday ended their semesters weeks early.
“Not a single place in Hong Kong is exempt from the rule of law, and that includes universities,” John Lee, the secretary for security, said Wednesday at a news conference. “Universities are not supposed to be the breeding ground of violence.”
The showdown has been brewing for years, going back to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And the roots of the protests in many ways harken back to social movements elsewhere.
On mainland China, students have led campaigns calling for sweeping political change, notably in 1919 and 1989. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence broke out on campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, most horrifically at Kent State University in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students, killing four and injuring nine.
Student activists in Hong Kong have lived by an exhausting weekly rhythm since the movement began in early June: protest on weekends, show up on Mondays for class, study for exams and apply for internships or jobs in between it all. Many argue with parents who disagree with their politics or tactics. Hundreds have been arrested in recent months and quickly released by the police, as required by law.
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