Hong Kong Protesters Hurl Gasoline Bombs at Government Offices
HONG KONG — Black-clad protesters hurled gasoline bombs at government offices in central Hong Kong on Sunday, as a day that began with a peaceful, if unauthorized, march by tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators quickly descended into pitched street battles.
The violence punctuated a weekend that began with fistfights between people on opposing sides of the city’s yawning political divide. Some protesters on Sunday vandalized a subway station and hurled bricks and gasoline bombs at a complex of government buildings that includes the city’s legislature. The police responded with tear gas and water cannons.
While the turnout at the Sunday march was lower than that of similar marches this summer, the chaotic scenes through the weekend highlighted the staying power — and raw anger — of a movement that has produced 15 consecutive weekends of unrest in a global financial hub known for order and efficiency.
The tumult came just over two weeks before a major political moment on Oct. 1: the 70th anniversary of modern China’s founding. A key question is what protesters will do on that date, and how Beijing and the Hong Kong police will respond.
“I don’t think the government will be able to respond to our demands by Oct. 1, so people will keep fighting for what they want,” Cheng Sui-ting, 27, an environmental educator, said at Sunday’s march, which began in the Causeway Bay shopping district and quickly stopped traffic.
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s beleaguered leader, said early this month that she would formally withdraw the contentious extradition bill that prompted the initial protests in June and led to the territory’s worst political crisis since it returned to Chinese control in 1997.
But mass rallies have continued, in part because the movement’s demands have gradually expanded to include broad calls for political reform, including universal suffrage, and an independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality.
On Sunday, protesters marched west from Causeway Bay toward Admiralty, a district that includes many government offices and the Hong Kong headquarters of the Chinese military. Along the way, they set fire to a banner commemorating China’s coming 70th anniversary.
Some protesters confronted police officers who were stationed on a footbridge near the police headquarters. “Corrupt cops,” they chanted, “may your whole family die!”
Other protesters occupied a major road in Admiralty, piling traffic barricades inside a nearby train station and across one of its entrances. A few used metal poles and umbrellas to smash some of the station’s glass railings.
The police responded by blanketing the streets with tear gas and spraying arcs of blue-dyed water from cannons mounted atop large vans. As nightfall approached, the scene had descended into a pitched street battle. The police later chased protesters from the area, back toward Causeway Bay. During the retreat, some protesters built roadblocks in the Wan Chai neighborhood and set a fire outside an entrance to its train station.
The city’s subway operator said it had closed Admiralty Station because of a “sudden escalation in the situation.”
Chris Cheung, a 22-year-old student who was helping to reinforce a makeshift barricade at one of the station’s exits, said protesters had targeted the subway operator, the MTR Corporation, for allowing the police to beat protesters inside stations on other occasions this summer.
“Some members of the public might understand why we do this,” he added. “If they have conscience, they would have watched the news and seen how people got beaten and understood our perspective.”
The weekend had started with fistfights on Saturday in at least two areas of Hong Kong, apparently after protesters confronted government supporters who were vandalizing the so-called Lennon Walls that the movement has set up across the city for pro-democracy messages and artwork.
At one point on Saturday, scuffling broke out in the Fortress Hill neighborhood of Hong Kong Island near the site of a vandalized Lennon Wall. Video footage showed men using Chinese flags to beat other men, presumably pro-democracy demonstrators, in the middle of a busy road.
And at a mall on the other side of Hong Kong’s harbor, a fight broke out between pro-democracy groups and pro-Beijing demonstrators who had gathered to sing the Chinese national anthem and waive Chinese flags.
The Hong Kong Hospital Authority said that at least 25 people had been hospitalized with injuries sustained in the scuffles on Saturday.
Days before Sunday’s march, an established Hong Kong advocacy group, the Civil Human Rights Front, had applied for a permit to hold the march legally. But the police rejected the request, citing concerns for public safety, and the group officially canceled the march.
But many protesters have been ignoring such bans for weeks now.
“I come out because it is my right, and I don’t care whether the police agree or not,” said Joesy Lau, 53, a clerk at an investment firm. “It’s my right.”
Sunday’s march followed days of smaller pro-democracy rallies around the city, including a politically tinged light display that coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival, a Chinese holiday that celebrates the harvest and normally features colorful lanterns.
Ms. Cheng, the environmental educator, said that the turnout at the march did not reflect the full range of participation in the pro-democracy movement. “I believe people are using different means to fight for their demands,” she said.
The march also came a week after a rally outside the American Consulate descended into violence.
That rally began peacefully, as hundreds of thousands gathered to drum up support for a bill moving through the United States Congress that would, among other things, require an annual justification for why the United States should offer Hong Kong special trade and business privileges.
But within hours, hard-core demonstrators on the fringes of the rally smashed windows and vandalized Central Station, a vital transit hub for shoppers and commuters. Police officers in riot gear later made arrests across the city, and sprayed tear gas in Causeway Bay to disperse protest crowds.
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