HONG KONG: More than 2,000 Hong Kong secondary school pupils, some wearing uniforms, joined university students on Friday to bolster a days-long protest against Beijing’s refusal to grant the city unfettered democracy.

Throngs of teenage students — many saying they had defied their parents’ wishes — descended on the Southern Chinese city’s government headquarters to add their voices to a class boycott kicked off by university students on Monday.

Student groups are spearheading a civil disobedience campaign along with democracy activists in protest at Beijing’s announcement last month that it would vet who can stand for Hong Kong’s top post of chief executive at the next election.

University students rallied a crowd on Monday that organizers said was 13,000-strong on a campus in the north of the city, breathing new life into a movement left stunned by Beijing’s hard-line stance.

On Thursday night, more than 2,000 people took their protest to the residence of Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying with the hope of speaking to him. Leung has so far refused to speak to the students or meet their leaders.

Protests continued Friday morning with around 900 secondary school students as young as 13 gathering outside the city’s main government complex shouting: “I want real elections not fake ones.”

“The government is ignoring our voices so I think that if we have so many secondary students boycotting the classes maybe then they will be willing to listen to us,” Agnes Yeung, a high school student, told AFP.

Chung Chun-wai, 17, said many of his friends came out to protest despite being told not to do so by their parents, highlighting the often sharp generational divide in the former British colony over its political future.

“I think secondary school students are a part of the society and I consider myself a citizen of Hong Kong.”