Hong Kong is Asia's premier financial centre,
but for nine weeks we've seen chaotic scenes like this,
with riot police fighting pitched battles with protesters
throughout parts of Hong Kong.
Now today, things really escalated when protesters
called a general strike and effectively shut down this city
of 7.4m people.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled.
And the MTR, the metro system in the city,
was effectively ground to a halt.
We're in a place called Sham Shui Po, in Hong Kong's Kowloon
District, and we've seen running battles here
between the police and the protesters that
just fired tear gas and cleared the street behind me.
This is just one of the many districts where protesters have
been fighting with the police.
Now, the protesters have really changed their tactics
in the last couple of days.
You see them increasingly mimicking
the police and the way that they dress,
with some of the protective equipment that they have.
And in just the last two days they've
adopted a new tactic of popping out of the subway systems
in different parts of town, causing havoc, and then
disappearing again before the police can arrest
them or properly clear them.
Police have just announced today that in the last nine
weeks of protests they've fired at least
1,000 rounds of tear gas, as well as arrested
more than 500 people.
And it looks like tonight there'll
be many, many more arrests as police battle protesters
into the night.
The danger here is it looks increasingly chaotic.
It looks increasingly like the police
may be losing control of the situation,
as we see battles like this across the entire territory
of Hong Kong.
And the real worry on everyone's mind
is whether or not Beijing finally decides it's fed up,
and decides to send in the People's Liberation Army.