Hong Kong pro-democracy protests resume

Thousands of pro-democracy activists returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday for their first big rally since mass protests late last year.

Many carried yellow umbrellas- a symbol for last year’s ‘Occupy Central’ campaign after protestors used them to fend off police pepper spray attacks.

Around 2,000 police flanked an estimated 3,000 protestors marching on the city’s shopping and financial districts, so as to prevent a repeat of last year’s campaign whereby demonstrators had shut down key roads for two months.

However, protest organisers insisted that Sunday’s marches would be peaceful and not seek to occupy any sites.

“We want to make it clear to the government that…we want true universal suffrage,” one of the organisers, Daisy Chan, said.

"In the past years, these citizens were less political than they are right now. The Occupy movement woke people up. The rally continues to call out to people to join the democracy movement."

However, Lam Woon-kwong of the Executive Council, Hong Kong's top policy-making body, told local radio on Sunday that “you can't threaten the central authorities."

Hong Kong has been under Chinese rule since 1997. Although Beijing has allowed elections for the territory’s next chief executive in 2017, it wants to screen candidates first.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators had taken to the streets of Hong Kong in September 2014, demanding a more democratic style of politics.

Protestors violently clashed with police and the final protest camp was dismantled in December.