HONG KONG—Fewer than 100 protesters remained holed up in a Hong Kong university on Nov. 21 as riot police encircled the campus, with some activists desperately searching for ways to escape while others hid.
Some protesters told Reuters they were holding out not for a showdown with police, but because they were innocent and looking for an escape route.
“I won’t consider surrendering. Surrendering is for people who are guilty. None of us inside are guilty,” Michelle, a 20-year-old student, said on the campus of Polytechnic University on the Kowloon peninsula.
Garbage has piled up around the campus, with trash and debris from homemade petrol bombs strewn across the grounds. Many protesters have abandoned their equipment, including gas masks and umbrellas.
Much of the campus is damaged, with rooms vandalized and windows shattered. Electricity and water are still functioning.
Graffiti sprayed on campus buildings read: “I have nothing to lose. I have no stake in society,” summing up the mood felt by many of the protesters on Thursday morning.
Some looked for breakfast in one of the university canteens, which remained stocked with food, including noodles and tomatoes.
The Asian financial hub has had a brief respite from months of sometimes violent demonstrations, with relative calm across the city for the past two days and nights ahead of District Council elections set for Sunday.
The government said late on Wednesday it was closely monitoring the situation to see whether the elections could be held safely.
The university, in the center of the bustling Kowloon peninsula, is the last campus still occupied by activists during a week that saw the most intense violence since the pro-democracy demonstrations escalated more than five months ago.
Some protesters have surrendered while others were held during escape attempts that included clambering down from a bridge to waiting motorbikes and fleeing through the sewers.
The Cross-Harbour Tunnel remained shut because of extensive damage, authorities said.
Some train services remained shut, the city’s metro operator MTR Corp said, while the rural Yuen Long station in New Territories would shut by 2 p.m., to pre-empt demonstrations marking four months since suspected triad gang members attacked protesters and commuters there.
The protesters say that they are angry at the way the MTR, Hong Kong’s public rail network, has helped riot police, and that shutting down key infrastructure forces the government to listen to their demands for universal suffrage and an independent inquiry into police violence, among other things.
Demonstrators are angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in freedoms promised to Hong Kong when the British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
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