Frontline view: Making the case for violence in Hong Kong protests

FILE PHOTO: An anti-extradition bill protester throws a stone at a police station in Tseung Kwan O residential district, in Hong Kong, China, August 4, 2019. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Pun sees himself as a peaceful, middle-class Hong Kong student. Yet since the beginning of June, he has been building barricades and throwing bricks at police, risking his own liberty to fight, as he sees it, for the city's freedoms.

In one of the world's safest cities, the idea of violence as a legitimate form of political expression - hand-in-hand with peaceful protest - is becoming increasingly mainstream in the evolving tactics of a decentralised pro-democracy movement that has disrupted Chinese-ruled Hong Kong for 11 weeks.