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.