Roy went out on Sunday afternoon, visiting friends, he said. But when she still has not heard from him at midnight, his mother starts to worry. For hours she sends him text messages. No Answer.
Then, shortly after three o'clock in the morning, a first sign: an emoji, a hand with an upraised thumb. He was in the Politechnic University, the last of the Hong Kong universities, in the night of Monday still protesters persevere, surrounded by hundreds of police.
"Are you inside or outside with teachers or without?"
"I'm inside, we're determined to stay until dawn."
I respect your courage, promise me you will not be left alone. "
The next day, Roy's mother and her husband are standing in one of the side streets around the large-scale locked-up university. She trembles and speaks to anyone who looks like he can go in to see her son. "He's not a student," she says, "he's a student, only 16 years old, what will happen to him now, what should he do, what should we advise him to do?"
In the video: How a Spiegel reporter experienced the protest day
MIRROR ONLINE
On the pedestrian bridges around the university, it stinks of the burned bulky rubbish of the barricades. In the Chatham Road fly stones and Molotov cocktails, then it crashes: tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray. Above the main entrance of the university rises a large black cloud of smoke. "I'm so worried," says Roy's mother, crying.
About 500 protesters are still locked in the university at this time. In the early morning they tried an outbreak. The police pushed them back. The night before it had been decided: Whoever faces the police will be let out. But the protesters do not want to face each other. If the judiciary classifies the occupation of the university as a "turmoil", they face high penalties. Since then, the protesters have been included.
Women and men are standing by the barriers, some are crying, some are praying, many are cursing the police, and many are encouragingly calling to the protesters in the direction of the university. An elderly woman says, "They've been in there for four days, they're hungry, thirsty, tired and desperate, and I'm scared that one of them will jump out the window."
photo gallery
7 pictures
Street battles in Hong Kong: chaos and fearIn the online forums that the protesters are talking about, there is a call to support the trapped. In the early afternoon, the call begins to take effect: road by street, which feeds the university, resistance forms. The tactic aims to lure the police into the adjacent neighborhoods, thereby disintegrating the siege ring around the university and opening a breach that will allow the trapped to break out.
The first part works: Hundreds move in all directions. Within hours, such amounts of Molotov cocktails and tear gas canisters are thrown and fired as in the beginning of the protest movement. The Gascoigne Road, which leads west under a highway bridge, sinks in such dense smoke that the bright blue sky over Hong Kong is no longer recognizable. When they move forward, policemen disable Molotov cocktails left behind by dumping the accelerant into a sink.
After two hours, one of the hundreds arrived at Nathan Road. The wide intersection where hotels and shopping malls stand looks like a street in the civil war zones of Baghdad or Beirut: littered with bricks and burning rubbish, surrounded by troops and howling police cars.
Rumors that protesters are already building professional explosive devices are at least as unconfirmed as others, according to which police use automatic firearms. Between Gascoigne and Nathan Road only single shots are heard on Monday afternoon: These are tear gas or rubber bullets. After all, Hong Kong is still different from Baghdad and Beirut.
The second part of the tactic does not work. The police have surrounded the university so closely that the departing hundreds are no longer significant. The siege ring stops. Even after dark the protesters remain trapped. "He's still in there," says Roy's mother. "Who could help?" She asks. "Foreign diplomats?" So far, all mediation attempts have failed, a group of parliamentarians as well as the University President.
More on SPIEGEL +
Until well into the neighborhoods Kowloon, Mongkok and Tsim Sha Tsui into the city is paralyzed. The police have closed traffic, protesters have built barricades and solve for the street battles of the coming night paving stones from the sidewalks. Passersby anxiously search for the fastest way out of the combat zone, old men on the floor, mothers with small children, wheelchair users.
In front of the few underground entrances, which are not yet barricaded, form long lines. A homeless person, who lacks a leg, tortures himself up a flight of stairs against the crowd: the elevators are down, in the evening several metro stations close completely.
Hong Kong, one of the richest and most modern cities in the world, a model of bourgeois and diversity, has continued to turn for one day on the spiral into chaos and fear.