Five years after riot police besieged Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and trapped protesters fought back with catapults and Molotov cocktails, four people who were there say they were trying to stand up for their promised rights and freedoms in the face of ongoing political encroachment from Beijing.
The 10-day siege of PolyU began on Nov. 18, 2019, after around 1,000 protesters occupied the university as part of an ongoing series of actions to achieve the movement’s key demands: fully democratic elections; the withdrawal of plans to allow extradition to mainland China; greater official and police accountability; and an amnesty for detained protesters.
The protesters were then trapped on campus as riot police encircled the area, prompting nearly 100,000 people to turn out to battle riot police across Tsim Sha Tsui, Jordan, Yau Ma Tei, Mong Kok and other parts of the Kowloon peninsula.
Four young people who were among the besieged protesters spoke to RFA Cantonese on the fifth anniversary of the siege, which ended Nov. 19, 2019, and proved to be one of the last major standoffs between black-clad protesters and riot police after months of clashes sparked by plans to allow extradition to mainland China.
A former protester now living in democratic Taiwan, who gave only the nickname Kai for fear of reprisals said he had been in the siege of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from Nov. 13-15, 2019 before responding to a call for help defending PolyU against riot police just a few days later.
He never expected the police to prevent the protesters from leaving, or that the siege would last 10 days.
“I never thought the police would adopt a siege approach,” Kai said. “They cut off our supply lines, and even cut off the water, which was inhumane.”
“Any supplies we had were brought in by older helpers from outside,” he said.
When the protesters did try to leave, they were outflanked by police on both sides, he said.
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“Soon after we ran out, we were intercepted by police in front of us, who forced us to run in another direction before we could move forward, but then after we’d run for a bit, we realized we were outflanked on both sides,” he said.
“All the police in front of us had their guns ready, and were waiting for us, so we had to go back to PolyU and plan our next move,” Kai said.
Kai managed to avoid arrest at the time, but left Hong Kong soon after learning he was on a police blacklist.
He said the political crackdown that followed the 2019 protest movement has shown that the protesters were right to fear Beijing’s encroachment on their city’s promised autonomy.
He said many young protesters were motivated by a desire to burn their home city to the ground rather than acquiesce in its transformation into another Chinese city under Communist Party rule.
“Nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer hiding its authoritarian tendencies, and has been sanctioned by the international community, while the Hong Kong economy declines by the day,” Kai said.
“This shows that our idea that we would all burn together was right on the money,” he said.
Around 1,300 people were arrested, with around 300 sent to hospital for injuries related to water cannon blast, tear gas, and rubber bullets, as protesters wielding Molotov cocktails, catapults and other makeshift weapons from behind barricades beat back repeated attempts by riot police to advance into the university campus.
Small groups of protesters continued to make desperate bids for freedom throughout the siege, many of them only to end up being arrested and beaten bloody by police.
Police also deployed tear gas, water cannon, and rubber bullets against a crowd of thousands trying to push through towards Poly U from Jordan district, with hundreds forming human chains to pass bricks, umbrellas, and other supplies to front-line fighters.
“I took part in a lot of protest-related activities from June [of that year] onwards, although I never considered myself a front-line fighter,” a former protester living in the United Kingdom who gave only the pseudonym Kit for fear of reprisals, told RFA Cantonese in a recent interview. “But I felt that if I wasn’t prepared to take it further, then we really would lose the rule of law in Hong Kong.”
The 2019 protests started out as a wave of mass public resistance to a legal amendment that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to face trial in mainland Chinese courts, a move that was generally seen as undermining the city’s status as a separate legal jurisdiction with an independent judiciary.
The movement later broadened to include the “five demands,” that included fully democratic elections, an amnesty for arrested protesters and greater official accountability.
The young protesters, hundreds of whom were minors, soon found themselves running out of food, and faced with a growing hygiene problem, and many tried to leave, only to be tear gassed, fired on with water cannon, or beaten up and taken away by police.
“We made three attempts to break out, but they all failed, so we went back to PolyU,” Kit said. “Everyone was scared, but we couldn’t come to any conclusion.”
“I later tried to get out by myself ... but I was arrested by the police,” he said, adding that the movement had soon fizzled under the impact of coronavirus measures introduced by the government in early 2020.
“The government used people’s fear of the virus to make the protests disappear,” Kit Jai said. “The outlook is pretty grim right now, but I still hope that the people of Hong Kong ... will keep its culture alive.”
A former protester living in Japan who gave only the nickname Tin for fear of reprisals said he also remembers the three failed attempts at breaking out, and the desperate mood that descended on those inside PolyU after those inside realized they were trapped.
“What impressed me most was that some of the protesters used a homemade catapult to launch Molotov cocktails, which set fire to the police armored vehicle, forcing it to retreat,” he said. “Everyone cheered when that happened.”
“Actually, the situation inside PolyU was total chaos, with a lot of misinformation coming in, and nobody really knew what to do,” he said.
Tin said he had fled Hong Kong and wound up in Japan after traveling to several other countries first.
“I’ve had good and bad experiences over the last five years, but I’ve survived,” he said.
A former protester now living in Germany who gave only the nickname Hei for fear of reprisals said he went to PolyU on Nov. 17 to try to persuade his fellow protesters to leave while they still could.
Before he knew it, he was trapped inside.
“I wanted to persuade them to leave, because the situation was critical, with helicopters flying overhead,” Hei said. “But they refused to leave.”
Hei never thought he’d be stuck there for as long as he was.
“When it became clear at around 9.30 that evening that those of us left inside weren’t going to be able to leave, things got pretty dark,” he said. “One guy told us to make a written statement pledging not to commit suicide.”
So he stayed behind to resist the advance of the riot police.
“The police offensive was really intense,” he said. “I was on the platform of A Core for the entire night.”
“Just below us were the frontline fighters, and the police water cannon truck, which sprayed us on the platform with blue water from time to time,” Hei said. “Then at about 6.00 p.m. on the 18th, the police suddenly launched an offensive and fired large numbers of tear gas rounds and rubber bullets from a high altitude at the Core A platform.”
“I opened my umbrella and squatted down next to a tree, and the bullets kept cracking on the umbrella,” he said. “We lost the position pretty quickly, but I was able to make it back to PolyU luckily.”
Inside, rumors were swirling that the police would burst in to arrest everyone, so Hei managed to escape by following a lawyer who had come in to try to help the young people inside.
He had a lucky escape. Anyone arrested during the siege was eventually charged with “rioting,” with some receiving jail terms of up to 10 years.
“They only took my ID details,” said Hei, who wasn’t arrested, and who later left Hong Kong for Germany.
He said the siege taught him how hard it is to stand up to an authoritarian regime.
“But I have no regrets, because anyone with a conscience or any sense of justice would have chosen to stand up,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.