Hong Kong protesters young, scared and waiting for the end
Nicole and Chloe, at 15 and 16 years old, have fought themselves to exhaustion at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Nicole and Chloe look at first glance like the image of the Hong Kong democracy protester. They have the carefully chosen pseudonyms; they have the black T-shirts and the black jeans. They have the goggles and breathing masks to keep out tear gas, and the helmets to fend off the rubber bullets.
They talk of their determination to resist the Hong Kong government and to die if necessary for the freedom of their home city. But two things above all stand out about them: they are very scared, and they are 15 and 16 years old.
The scene at Hong Kong Polytechnic University during the past few days has been extraordinary in several ways. A campus has been transformed into the site of an almost medieval siege, defended with fire, catapults and bows and arrows. The city district around it has become a no-man’s land of drifting smoke and smashed pavements.
But the overwhelming atmosphere this week is one of dread — of terrified young people, many still children, confronted with a sense of imminent doom and desperate to go home.
“We came here on Sunday because they were appealing for people to come in and increase the numbers,” Nicole says. “We thought that we could help to rescue the protesters inside. But now we need to be rescued ourselves.”
“Of course, we are worried,” Chloe adds. “Of course, our families are worried. They just want us to get out and get home safely. We want to leave — but we want to leave together.”
It was all quite different on Sunday. Throughout that day, the mood in the university was one of giddy defiance. On the main road in front of PolyU, as it is called, a corps of young black-clad men skirmished with the police, driving back water cannon and anti-riot trucks with hurled bricks and fire bombs.
Through their booming megaphones, the police warned them that they were rioters, a charge that can carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years. The protesters refer to themselves with a Chinese word meaning “the valiants”. When tear gas canisters landed among them, they picked them up and — protected by their goggles, masks and umbrellas — threw them back.
An hour before dawn on Monday, the police “raptor” unit advanced towards the barricades at the front of the campus, which were immediately set on fire. In the late morning it was still burning, but the spirit of angry determination had been quelled.
Perhaps it was the exhaustion of several nights without sleep; perhaps it was the realisation that the campus was surrounded and sealed off by police on all sides. But the valiant ninjas of the day began to look restless and vulnerable.
The weapons factories were deserted. The artillery nests were abandoned. Billboard-sized maps of the campus were marked up with potential escape routes, many of them scribbled out as it became clear that they were blocked by the riot police. People went into anxious huddles to discuss how to get out.
MC, Rachel and Bosco are three friends from high school who, like many others, responded to the mobilisation appeal. Several of the valiants carry bows and arrows, serious weapons stolen from the university archery club.
Bosco also carries a bow. But unlike the others, his is just a curved tree branch, of the kind a little boy makes for a game of Robin Hood. Like his two friends, he is 16.
“Before I wanted to surrender, but now I’ve changed my mind,” MC says. “I don’t want to stay here any longer but I don’t want to go to prison.”
It was not that those present were having doubts about the justice of their cause, or the methods they were using in pursuing it. No one I spoke to was demonstrating for the first time; many of them have been turning out since the first of the big marches in June, against the now abandoned extradition bill that set off the whole protest movement, which now demands free elections and the release of demonstrators from jail.
Those were massive and peaceful protests by ordinary citizens, with an epilogue of rowdy behaviour by a small hardcore.
Nowadays, the police refuse permission for legal marches. The hardcore “valiants” are all that the movement has, but their numbers have grown. Opinion polls show they largely retain the support of the population at large.
They feel themselves to have been boxed into a position in which fire and stones are the only means left to them of expressing anger and defiance against a police force content to use tear gas, high-pressure hoses, pepper gas, rubber bullets and — as on two occasions over the weekend — live rounds.
“We’ve been protesting for more than five months,” says an 18-year-old who calls himself Spiderman.
“From the beginning we used only the most peaceful means to express our demands. Compared to the power being used against us, the guns and the tear gas, what do we have?
“I don’t feel as if we have powerful force on our side.”
The police have invited their surrender, but only on condition that they walk out without masks and obediently follow instructions, submitting to arrest.
Having been arrested at a protest previously for “illegal assembly” and released on bail, young Spiderman faces guaranteed incarceration if he is picked up again. “I’m really scared,” he says. “I don’t know if I should stay or leave. I don’t know what to do.”
A few hundred protesters tried to sneak out through a side entrance but were driven back by tear gas. Dozens made a brilliant escape by rappelling from a bridge on Tuesday.
The rest await their fate. Gwen, 27, pleads with me to stay on the campus, on the basis that the presence of journalists will encourage the police to behave.
“The police just want to arrest us, they will never let us go home,” she says. “Leaving here is more dangerous than staying.”
MORE ON HONG KONG: Mob protesters rule the streets; Tensions must not stop us from Chinese engagement
Less than 1km away from the campus, weeping parents begged police to be allowed to get through to take their children home.
A senior politician named Jasper Tsang, one of the most respected among the pro-Beijing leaders, went to the campus to mediate.
Even if he fails, there is not going to be a bloodbath. The police are callous in many ways but they are not indiscriminately murderous, at least not yet. They have held back because they know the “valiants” are exhausted, and have less and less resistance to offer. There will be punches and blows, but the worst most of the children of PolyU are likely to face is imprisonment, and the blighted futures that will bring.
They are doing something unmatched elsewhere in the world: standing up to the authority of the Chinese Communist Party — with plenty of fear but without hesitation.
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