With tensions and anxiety running high at the airport, at one point a police officer was attacked, retreating when he appeared to pull a gun, and a man they accused of being a mainland Chinese police officer but his identity couldn’t be immediately confirmed. Watch the video.

Earlier in the day, the city’s leader, Carrie Lam, urged protesters to obey the law, saying that the “stability and well-being of seven million people are in jeopardy.”

The famously sleek and efficient airport, long a symbol of Hong Kong pride, has in effect become a point of leverage for the protesters.

The mainland: China’s state-controlled news media is waging a disinformation war against the protesters, using manipulated images and videos of the demonstrations to stir up nationalist and anti-Western sentiment.

Takeaway: The recent unrest is exposing the inherent conflict in the political experiment that began when the semiautonomous city returned to Chinese rule in 1997: an effort to unite Beijing’s authoritarianism with Hong Kong’s civil liberties.