Episode 26: ‘Fire and Water’

Producer/Director Andréa Schmidt

Protesters clutching smartphones and wearing masks took to the streets. Armor-clad riot police fired water cannons and tear gas to reassert authority. For months, the two sides clashed in a spate of increasingly violent confrontations at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

The siege of PolyU last November was the climax of intense confrontations between the Hong Kong police, who had exhausted their tolerance for dissent, and protesters who refused to give up their freedoms without a fight.

Watch video from the front lines at PolyU as the area was turned into an urban battlefield. Listen to masked protesters, too frightened to speak openly, describe on camera how they barricaded themselves inside university buildings and desperately tried to escape days after riot police stormed the school.

Featured reporters

Reporters and editors in The New York Times’s Hong Kong and Beijing bureaus collaborated with members of our visual investigations team to reconstruct the chaotic events leading up to the siege of PolyU for this episode of “The Weekly.” They include Keith Bradsher, the Shanghai bureau chief who used to be the bureau chief in Hong Kong; Javier C. Hernández, a correspondent in Beijing; Barbara Marcolini of the visual investigations team; Tiffany May, who is based in the Hong Kong bureau; Edward Wong, a diplomatic and international correspondent in Washington who previously served as Beijing bureau chief; and Gillian Wong, The Times’s China editor in Hong Kong.