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Hi all, Ben Hillier has gone to HK to report on the state of the movement there for Redflag. Check out his coverage: "Hong Kong Polytechnic is calm, the barricades enormous, and the graffiti ubiquitous. Among the slogans are “Liberty or death”, “Kill someone, pay the price”, and “If your family member were killed, would you still go to work?” The last is an exhortation for the city’s workers to strike over the death of 22-year-old Chow Tsz-lok last week. Police say he fell from a car park. Students don’t believe it. Several buildings have been smashed up, including the ground floor of the registrar’s office. Masked students chat in a coffee shop amid the shattered glass. Others continue spraying political slogans on the ground outside the student association and on walls not already covered. Two more drive seconded maintenance vehicles about. On the roof, a lookout keeps watch. They are nervous, one student says, about another police offensive, like that at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). CUHK is under siege. The train line to it has been shut and, being in the outer east of the region, you can get there only by car. But police have set up roadblocks to control who goes into the area. The university has cancelled all classes until the end of the year and is telling resident students to leave. It is an ominous development that will isolate the activists on campus and open them to a perhaps more ferocious attack. At least 60 people were injured when police invaded the campus on Tuesday, firing rubber bullets and tear gas. It wasn’t just current students. Many alumni rushed to the university to help. The university president and other officials came to negotiate with police. They were tear gassed as well. The university has historically been one of the centres of student activism in Hong Kong. And it has been at the forefront of opposition to the now-shelved “extradition law” – a catalyst for the current upheaval because it would have allowed Hong Kongers to be extradited to the mainland for trial and imprisonment. “These students have been very active”, Au Loong Yu, a veteran activist and author, says in his office on the other side of town. “CUHK got the moniker ‘Riot University’ from pro-Beijing netizens and it has been taken up by many people. They and the police say the dorms are factories for producing Molotov cocktails and that the university encourages it.” CUHK militants certainly are tough. After suffering the assault on Tuesday, today (Wednesday) students were testing a catapult they built to launch petrol bombs at police when they next try to take the campus, according to a report in the *South China Morning Post*. There is consensus here that CUHK is the most important centre of university activism and – depending on which side you are on – that it must be either defended or crushed. He will be reporting daily. https://redflag.org.au/node/6951 _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
