Stay or go? Hong Kong’s international students pack their bags amid protest chaos
- Foreign students are being called home or face the agonising decision of whether to wait out the unrest
- Hundreds of mainland Chinese students are also fleeing, while Taiwan is evacuating 81 from Chinese University after campus clashes
Maya Boehm, an American exchange student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), has her bags packed to fly home at a moment’s notice. On Tuesday, St Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, told the 20-year-old that she and her classmates had been summoned home to “ensure the continued safety and security of our students” after chaotic clashes the previous night between anti-government protesters and police on the CUHK campus.
The religious studies major has not been given an exact timetable for her return, but she expects to be on a plane within days.
“Everything is very unpredictable right now and I just have to take things not only day by day, but hour by hour,” Boehm said. “It breaks my heart to have to leave like this.”
Boehm is just one of many foreign students in Hong Kong at risk as at least six universities become the latest battlegrounds for the unrest which has gripped the city since June. Protests have also broken out at the University of Hong Kong, Baptist University, City University, Polytechnic University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
After CUHK became the site of some of the most violent clashes yet on Tuesday – with protesters and police trading petrol bombs for hundreds of rounds of tear gas – foreign students are being called home or face the agonising decision of whether to wait out the unrest. CUHK on Wednesday announced it had cancelled the rest of the semester, while most other universities suspended classes until next week or replaced lectures with online modules for the rest of the term.
On Wednesday night, protesters built “checkpoints” at CUHK to watch for police, erected barricades and lit fires near Baptist University in Kowloon Tong, and destroyed water pipes near PolyU in Hung Hom.
