HONG KONG -- Thousands of Hong Kong university students abandoned classes Monday to rally against Chinese government limits on voting rights, a bellwether demonstration of the city's appetite for turning smoldering discontent into street-level opposition.
"University students must shoulder the responsibility of these times," Nathan Law Kwun-chung, the acting president of the student union of Lingnan University, told the crowd crammed into the main quad at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Some held banners of their schools, many others umbrellas to ward off the sun in the former British colony.
"Boycotting classes is just the first wave of resistance," he said. "Today is not the last step for us all. It's the first step, and countless resistance campaigns will bear fruit."
The student strikers, who have said they will boycott classes for the week, are at the vanguard of a planned succession of protests against rules proposed by China that would effectively give Beijing the right to screen candidates for Hong Kong's top official.
Organizers said about 13,000 students attended the rally, but they did not immediately have an estimate of the number of students, out of the nearly 78,000 living in Hong Kong, who boycotted classes Monday.
High school students plan to join the boycott for one day, on Friday. While the strike's first day indicated a modest start, the biggest showdown will come if the main pro-democracy group, Occupy Central with Love and Peace, acts on vows to flood Central, the city's main business district, with demonstrators.
The confrontation with Beijing has moved the territory to the front lines of the battle for democratic rights in China, after a government clampdown has silenced much dissent on the mainland. Since Hong Kong was returned by the United Kingdom to Chinese rule in 1997, it has enjoyed considerable legal autonomy under the "one country, two systems" formula, in which Hong Kong residents retained rights not available elsewhere in China.
The Chinese legislature proposed election rule changes for Hong Kong last month that starting in 2017 would allow residents to vote directly for the leader of the city's government, the chief executive, but would use a nominating committee dominated by pro-Beijing loyalists to restrict how many and which candidates can enter the contest.
The demonstrations may have only the slightest chance of forcing Beijing to change its mind and allow an open ballot, analysts said, but student activists said they were ready to fight for many years.
"We have to raise our bargaining power," Alex Chow Yong Kang, secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said in an interview. "We have to tell them that Hong Kong people are willing to sacrifice much more."
Frustration with Chinese policy in Hong Kong is especially deep among the young, and contention over voting rights has given many otherwise apolitical students a jolt of civic engagement.
"I think the entire pro-democracy movement understands that Beijing will not budge," said Joseph Cheng, a professor of political science at the City University of Hong Kong. "Any campaign which cannot secure concrete objectives within a reasonable period of time is going to be a very, very difficult campaign."
For some of the protesters, idealism and anger trumped practical concerns.
"I'm not sure if this protest will really affect the decision by China, but I'm sure if I don't come I will regret it in the future," said Cathy Lee, 21, a criminology student at City University. "I have to join this protest in order to fight for democracy in Hong Kong in the future."
A poll by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, conducted this month and released over the weekend, vividly demonstrated the generational divide. While 54 percent of Hong Kong residents said the city's Legislative Council should veto electoral changes if they excluded candidates whose political positions differed from the Chinese government's, that percentage went up to 76 percent among people ages 15 to 24.
The 27 pro-democracy members of Hong Kong's 70-member Legislative Council have the power to veto any election changes, if they remain united. However, mainland officials have said the election plan was all or nothing, and a veto would also foreclose the possibility of electing the chief executive by popular vote.
Chinese President Xi Jinping appears unlikely to give in to democracy demands.
On Monday, he met a delegation of some of Hong Kong's wealthiest tycoons, many of whom have argued that street protests like those threatened by Occupy Central would imperil the city's reputation for business-friendly stability. In published comments afterward, he told the business leaders that the Chinese government's basic policies on Hong Kong "have not changed and will not change," the Ta Kung Pao, a pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper, reported on its website.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Forsythe of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/23/2014