Clashes rage again as HK police officer hit by arrow
Print Edition
A POLICE officer was struck by an arrow fired by a Hong Kong protester yesterday, as fierce clashes raged around a campus which has turned into a base for anti-government rioters.
Protests have tremored through the global financial hub since June.
Chinese President Xi Jinping last week issued his most strident comments on the crisis, saying it threatened the “one country, two systems” model.
Scores of radicals dug in at Hong Kong Polytechnic University yesterday, vowing to defend it from police and to maintain a blockade on the nearby Cross Harbour Tunnel, which has been closed for several days.
As dusk fell, police tried to retake a footbridge over the tunnel but were met by a barrage of petrol bombs.
Earlier, protesters parried an attempt by police to break through into the polytechnic campus, firing rocks from a homemade catapult from the university roof.
Police shared images of an arrow embedded in the calf of an officer outside the campus and decried the use of lethal weapons, declaring the campus a “riot scene.”
Activists have threatened to wreak further havoc today, in a follow-up to a week of chaos which left city streets strewn with debris.
Protesters last week engineered a campaign of blockades and vandalism, which forced the police to draft in prison officers, shut down large chunks of Hong Kong’s train network and closed schools and shopping malls.
Two people have died this month as the violence worsened, while the financial hub has been pushed into a recession by the turmoil.
In an article published on a blog of Paul Chan, the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong government, Chan said the mounting pressure from the ongoing social crisis on the economy would be passed onto the job market and trigger a rapid surge in unemployment if the economy, especially private consumption, continues to weaken.
Hong Kong’s gross domestic product contracted 2.9 percent year on year in the third quarter, sharply down from a 0.4 percent growth in the second quarter.
Accordingly, the HKSAR government cut its GDP forecast for 2019 to a negative 1.3 percent.
More than 2 percentage points of the third-quarter decline were contributed by the worst-hit sectors by the monthslong unrest including retail sales, catering and hospitality, according to Chan.
“It was selfish and irresponsible of rioters to make ordinary citizens unable to go to work by blocking main roads and paralyzing public transport, causing inconvenience and even safety threats to the citizens,” he added.
Hong Kong’s airport authority said October traffic figures were down 13 percent on last year with 5.4 million passengers as the economy takes a battering.
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