Thousands of students protest in Hong Kong

HONG KONG – Thousands of Hong Kong college and university students boycotted classes Monday to protest Beijing’s decision to restrict electoral reforms, the start of a weeklong strike marking the latest phase in the battle for democracy in the southern Chinese city.

The strike comes as dozens of the city’s tycoons and business leaders visit Beijing to meet with China’s communist leaders, who are seeking to bolster support among Hong Kong’s pro-establishment billionaire elites for the central government’s policies on the semiautonomous city.

Student organizers are dismayed over Beijing’s decision in August to rule out open nominations for candidates under proposed guidelines for the first-ever elections to choose Hong Kong’s top leader, promised for 2017.

The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, insists candidates be vetted by an elite committee similar to the body of mostly pro-Beijing elites that has until now selected the city’s leaders.

The battle over democracy in Hong Kong has led to an increasingly tense and divided city, with activists threatening to stage a mass “occupation” of the Asian financial hub’s central business district as early as Oct. 1 as part of a civil disobedience campaign to press their demands.

When China took control of the former British colony in 1997, it agreed to a mini-constitution that guarantees Hong Kong can keep civil liberties unseen on the mainland, while also promising that the leader can eventually be chosen through “universal suffrage.” But Beijing’s insistence that candidates be screened for patriotism to China has stoked fears among democracy groups that Hong Kong will never get genuine democracy.

“The student strike will mark the turning point of the democratic movement,” Alex Chow, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, told the crowd rallying at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s suburban campus. “We will not have illusions in the government anymore, but we’ll have faith in ourselves. We are willing to pay the price for democracy.”

Students plan to gather daily for the rest of the week in a downtown park next to government headquarters.