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Hours after mainland Chinese officials announced new rules ensuring that only handpicked candidates could run for Hong Kongs top leadership position in 2017, local democracy activist Benny Tai Yiu-ting declared a new "era of civil disobedience."

Tai, a co-founder of a movement called Occupy Central that has been pressing for real democracy for more than a year, called Sunday for Hong Kongs 7 million people to stage wave after wave of protests. He urged Hong Kongers to participate in sit-ins on major roads and paralyze the citys financial district known as Central -- to demand an unfettered field of candidates.

But two days later, Tai, a constitutional law professor at Hong Kong University, seemed to admit defeat. In an interview with Bloomberg News on Tuesday, he remarked that the strategies used by his civil-disobedience movement had failed.

Tai also expressed doubt about the number of people who would participate in any sit-in. He said that any mass sit-ins would have to occur on a public holiday or a weekend to inflict minimal damage on the economy of Hong Kong, a former British territory and major Asian financial hub.

Mainland Chinese officials have warned that any sit-in could cause major damage to the economy and stature of Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and was promised 50 years of significant autonomy.

So is Occupy Central dead, or just gearing up for its next fight?

The movement has been down before: Just weeks before it rallied nearly 800,000 of Hong Kongs residents to participate in a nonbinding June referendum on what rules for the 2017 vote should look like, the group was beset with infighting. Yet it managed to rally significant participation in the unofficial vote.

Now, the group is trying to backpedal from Tais remarks. In a press release sent out that same day, Occupy Central said: Hong Kongers wont accept failure in our road to democracy. We have said that if the government does not keep [its] promise to allow Hong Kongers to have genuine universal suffrage in 2017, we will Occupy Central with love and peace. We will do what we said.

The rules announced Sunday will mean that only two or three candidates who are vetted by a special, Beijing-aligned committee will be allowed to run for the top leadership post.

In a phone interview, Occupy Central co-founder Chan Kin-man agreed with Tai that for us to attain specific goals of true democracy in 2017 is almost impossible. I believe the chance of change is very slim.

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Hong Kong democracy movement feels Beijing's pressure