Hong Kong: With wooden catapults to launch petrol bombs and bows and arrows pilfered from sports departments, Hong Kong’s democracy protesters are combining new tactics with medieval tech as they battle police.
Roads in the financial hub have been blockaded with bamboo lattices this week, while mini Stonehenge-like structures have been built from dug-up pavement as the southern Chinese city lurches deeper into crisis.
Universities have become the epicentre of battle, with students — joined by other black-clad ‘braves’ of the frontline protest movement — saying they have been pressed into the defence of their campuses by police threats. As a rolling strike cripples the transport system of the famously frenetic city and fuels already intense clashes with police, hardcore protesters have bolstered their arsenal of Molotovs and bricks with an unlikely array of weapons.
Those include sports gear — javelins and bows and arrows lifted from university storerooms, as well as tennis racquets to bat away tear-gas canisters. Chairs and mattresses have been pulled from college dorms for use as barricades or shields against increasingly heavy barrages of police rubber bullets.
This homespun approach has also taken on a medieval edge in one of Asia’s most modern cities.
Giant wooden catapults have been constructed from scratch, while caltrops — three-pronged spikes made of plastic piping and nails — have been laid to impede officers on foot alongside mazes of bricks to trip up police snatch squads.
Around a thousand protesters waited at Hong Kong Polytechnic University as Thursday afternoon wore on, anticipating a police charge in the hours ahead.
The campus faces the Cross Harbour tunnel, a key route between the Kowloon peninsula, which is connected by land to the Chinese mainland, and the finance centre of Hong Kong Island. (AFP)
