Hong Kong protests: three months on and the anti-government activists want their enemies to burn with them. Is there any end in sight?
- In a series of in-depth articles on the unrest rocking Hong Kong, the Post goes behind the headlines to look at the underlying issues, current state of affairs, and where it is all heading
- In this final instalment, we talk to frontline protesters as they question whether they are prepared for long jail sentences and why they are making wills for their family
They are strangers in a crowd. They do not know each other’s real names and have little clue how the other looks under the gas masks they call snouts, the 3M goggles and hard hats. But they regard each other as sau zuk, which means “hands and feet”, a Cantonese idiom to refer to how close they are that losing the other is like having a limb amputated.
For the past 14 weeks, 24-year-old designer Kelvin has been with his sau zuk on the frontline taking on the riot police. “There are three segments in the frontline – the forefront, middle and the back,” he says. “Those on the forefront would have to hold the so-called shields while people in the back would have to source for projectiles which could be thrown beforehand to back up the forefront.”
Some days, if they are lucky, they can take over a nearby footbridge with another team of comrades stationed there to hurl objects at the charging officers.
For Kelvin, the image of a fellow protester whom he had just met on the frontline being hauled away by police and leaving a trail of blood stains in his wake left him feeling helpless. He says: “I keep awake thinking of it, and I blame myself.”
Over in Central’s Edinburgh Place on September 2 as thousands of secondary school pupils gather for a school boycott rally, a 15-year-old student surnamed Pang laments: “I can’t sleep and can’t eat, my heart is tired.”
His face is covered by a full mask and he is dressed in black with protective shoulder, arm and shin pads above his grey Nike trainers. On his arm is a shield made from a road sign he had taken down and etched with the word ‘revolution’.
