The anti-mask law introduced by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government on Oct 4 has proved effective in reducing the number of protesters on the street, as now that they can no longer hide their identities and are prone to arrest, many of the rioters have lost the courage of anonymity.

However, to make up for the growing manpower shortage, the organizers of the rioting have compensated by raising the intensity of the violence that has seen running battles between rioters and the police in many parts of the city on a regular basis. That the violence has been intensified was evident on the weekend, when a police officer was seriously injured after he was slashed across the neck by a rioter with a parcel cutter, and many police vehicles were vandalized and police stations fire-bombed.

In a particularly alarming development, Hong Kong police say a homemade remote-controlled explosive device intended to "kill or to harm" police officers was detonated on Sunday.

Although no casualties were reported, Chin-chiu Suryanto, an officer with the police force's bomb-disposal unit, told a news conference on Monday that it was like "terrorist events" seen elsewhere.

Certainly terrorists have no compunction about using violence and annihilating human values in pursuit of their aims. Indeed, violence is used to intimidate and coerce and to silence dissenting voices and punish any who oppose them, as well as to undermine belief in the authorities' ability to maintain law and order by provoking an extreme response against a particular group. All of which the protesters in Hong Kong hope to achieve with their increasingly vicious violence.

Shops and restaurants are trashed simply because the owners belong to those business groups speaking out against them. The MTR railway network has been systematically attacked, with station facilities vandalized and objects deliberately thrown onto railway tracks. The railway operator's "guilt"? Not providing service to the rioters going to and from the scenes of violent protests.

Meanwhile, people confronting them on the street are viciously assaulted, often beaten senseless for speaking out against the protesters or on the slightest suspicion they might be acting against them.

While the dramatic surge of violence and lawlessness on the weekend may have been inspired by the appearance in person of US Republican senator Ted Cruz in the city on Saturday — A big irony in his remarks was that he didn't see any violence while touring the city. Perhaps compared to the US-engineered color revolutions elsewhere, the violence here is nothing — the underlying trend of the protests has been for them to become increasingly violent as the organizers try to give them the color veneer of an insurgency.

However, as President Xi Jinping made clear on Sunday, anyone attempting to split any part of the country from China is pursuing a pipe dream. His use of a phrase used by the Chinese when talking about their worst enemies — that they will have their bodies crushed and their bones turned to powder — shows that the country will not allow any terrorists and extremists of whatever hue to carve up the country, wherever they may be.