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HONGKONG — Pro-democracy protesters streamed through the heart ofHong Kong on Sunday in their first sizable show of strength since the police cleared occupations that blocked streets for 11 weeks late last year.
The protest was much smaller and milder than the “Occupy” protests that ended in mid-December, and fell well short of the 50,000 participants that organizers had promised. In the end, they estimated that 13,000 people joined, while the police estimated that the crowd reached 8,800 at its peak.
But the march marked a tentative test of how much support the pro-democracy groups could muster in the new year for their campaign to force the government into accepting open elections for the city’s top official.
“We want to sustain the momentum after the Occupy protests,” Joshua Wong, an 18-year-old student leader at the forefront of last fall’s street demonstrations, said while walking toward the financial district of Hong Kong.
Hundreds of police officers watched Sunday as the crowd walked through streets crammed with weekend shoppers. But there were no signs of confrontation with the protesters, many of whom held yellow umbrellas, a symbol of the street occupation last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/w...-return-to-streets-of-hong-kong.html?ref=asia