HONG KONG - The Hong Kong government said on Monday that it had pulled back the riot police from roads across the city where thousands of furious residents have blocked traffic, a day after the police used tear gas and batons to break up a student-led demonstration.
The government urged the protesting residents to end their street sit-ins so that life in this busy commercial city could return to normal.
The protesters seized control of busy thoroughfares at several points across Hong Kong on Sunday night. Although the sit-ins had shrunk by Monday morning, thousands of people remained, many of them wearing surgical masks and goggles in anticipation that the police would try to disperse them with tear gas or pepper spray.
The statement by the government appeared to allay such fears, for now at least.
'Because the residents who have assembled on the roadways have largely returned to calm, the riot police have already withdrawn,' said an unidentified spokesman for the government. The spokesman 'urged the assembled residents to maintain calm and to peacefully disperse.'
But in the Admiralty area, home to the government's offices and the focus of much of the protesters' anger on Sunday, many demonstrators said they were determined to stay until the city's top leader, Leung Chun-ying, resigned and answered their demands for democratic elections to choose his successor.
'I came out after I watched the television last night of the police attacking the students,' said Agnes Yip, a sales worker in her 20s who had slept overnight on an expressway at Admiralty.
'We won't leave until we have a dialogue between the government and the people,' she said. 'We'll stay all day at least, and then tomorrow.'
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