Hundreds Of Thousands March For Democracy In Hong Kong Tuesday July 01,2014

Hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters marched in Hong Kong on Tuesday, many calling for the city's leader to be sacked, in what could turn out to be the biggest challenge to Chinese Communist Party rule in more than a decade.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said his government would do its "utmost" to move towards universal suffrage and stressed the need for stability after nearly 800,000 people voted for full democracy in an unofficial referendum last month.

Organizers put the number of protesters at more than 510,000, emphasizing this was a conservative estimate. Police said some 98,600 had joined the protest at its peak.

Johnson Yeung, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, one of the organizers of the march, said activists would take to the streets to occupy the business district if China does not respond to demands for a direct election in 2017.

Scores of demonstrators dispersed late on Tuesday, but thousands remained after midnight. Some student groups, including Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, prepared to hunker down for the night.

"The Hong Kong government is now controlled by the Chinese government," said Daniel Cheng, 24, a recent graduate who now works as a building surveyor. "My mom said not to be arrested, to be careful. I will try, but I think I should do what I can for Hong Kong, my colleagues, my classmates, my friends."

A security blanket was thrown across the heart of the business district, home to global banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered, as thousands of protesters lingered. Some 200 police stood guard outside the offices of Hong Kong's leader nearby.

Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao urged a visiting Hong Kong youth group on Tuesday to make sure young people "staunchly uphold "one country, two systems," China's Xinhua news agency reported. Beijing's Liaison Office in Hong Kong went further.

"We are firmly against the radical and illegal activities launched by very few people, because we all have responsibilities to defend the bottom line of law which Hong Kong people cherish," office head Zhang Xiaoming said in apparent reference to the referendum and planned protests.

"Central government firmly supports the universal suffrage in Hong Kong, and its sincerity and determination is unswerving. This kind of sincerity and determination won't have any change or shake because of the so-called referendum or the scale of the march."