Hong Kong protesters march on station to 'educate' Chinese mainlanders

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters rallied outside a controversial train station linking the territory to the Chinese mainland on Sunday, the latest mass show of anger as activists try to keep pressure on the city's pro-Beijing leaders.

The rally was the first major large-scale protest since last Monday's unprecedented storming of parliament by largely young, masked protesters -- which plunged the international financial hub further into crisis.

Hong Kong has been rocked by a month of huge marches as well as a series of separate violent confrontations with police, sparked by a law that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China.

The bill has since been postponed in response to the intense backlash but that has done little to quell public anger, which has evolved into a wider movement calling for democratic reforms and a halt to sliding freedoms in the semi-autonomous city.

Organisers said some 230,000 people snaked their way through streets in the harbour-front district of Tsim Sha Tsui, an area popular with Chinese tourists. Police said 56,000 turned out at the protest's peak.

The march was billed as an opportunity to explain to mainlanders in the city what their protest movement is about.

Inside China, where news and information are heavily censored, the Hong Kong protests have been portrayed as a primarily violent, foreign-funded plot to destabilise the motherland, not a mass popular movement over Beijing's increased shadow over the semi-autonomous hub.

"We want to show tourists, including mainland China tourists what is happening in Hong Kong and we hope they can take this concept back to China," Eddison Ng, an 18-year-old demonstrator, told AFP.

Hong Kongers speak Cantonese but protesters were using Bluetooth to send leaflets in Mandarin -- the predominant language on the mainland -- to nearby phones, hoping to spread the word to mainlanders by digital word of mouth.

"Why are there still so many people coming out to protest now?" one man said in Mandarin through a loudspeaker. "Because the Hong Kong government didn't listen to our demands."