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Read MoreWill 'Occupy Central' hurt Hong Kong?

The official also said "the legitimacy of the chief executive will be greatly enhanced if "the election provides the people of Hong Kong a genuine choice of candidates representative of the voters' will."

"We understand that the August 31 announcement is just one step in an ongoing process leading to a final decision on election reform in Hong Kong and will continue to watch as the process unfolds," the official said in Washington.

On the surface, the NPC's decision is a breakthrough that endorses the framework for the first direct vote by a Chinese city to choose its leader. Beijing is already hailing it as a milestone in democratic reform.

However, by tightly curbing nominations for the 2017 leadership poll, some democrats said Beijing was pushing a Chinese-style version of "fake" democracy.

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The NPC statement said all nominations would be carried out according to "democratic procedures" and each candidate would need the endorsement of more than half of a nominating committee that will be similar in composition to an existing 1,200-person election committee stacked with Beijing loyalists.

The proposed electoral framework will still needs to be approved by two-thirds of Hong Kong's 70-seat legislature. With pro-democracy lawmakers holding more than a third of the seats, the proposal will likely be shelved.

In that case, the next leader would likely again be chosen by a small election committee. Wang Zhenmin, a prominent legal scholar and adviser to the Chinese government, said recently that: "Less perfect universal suffrage is better than no universal suffrage," adding that this window of opportunity in Hong Kong was an historical crossroads after "2,000 years of (Chinese) feudal history without any democracy."

Senior Chinese officials have repeatedly warned activists against their "illegal" protests, and say they won't back down.

Originally posted here:
Hong Kong braces for protests