There was no danger of missing the parting message from Hong Kong’s protesters on Thursday. It was chanted as they awaited arrest, spelt out in gold balloons, chalked on to the road and formed in giant letters made from their discarded tents: “We’ll be back.”

The dismantling of the main protest zone at Admiralty on Thursday has concluded the first phase of a pro-democracy movement that astonished even its most enthusiastic advocates, at one stage drawing tens of thousands into unprecedented mass civil disobedience.

But while the occupation is over – bar the handful of participants left at a small site in Causeway Bay – no one believes the clearance has finished off the campaign for genuine elections.

Carrie Lam, chief secretary of Hong Kong, said earlier that the government was not “naive” enough to think removing demonstrators from Admiralty would mark the end of the movement.

Long before the barricades fell and the tents were dragged away, activists had begun debating their next course of action. Behind closed doors, authorities are also pondering their options.

Ho-fung Hung, of Johns Hopkins University in the US, grew up in Hong Kong and follows its politics. He said: “If Beijing signals a little bit of willingness, they think it will give the wrong signal to people to come out again, so for now I think the hard line will prevail.

“There will be arrests and the situation will turn for the worst, but the young people’s anger is still here ... This could erupt any time.”

The authorities would crack down to warn people off further protests, he said, through means including prosecutions and restrictions on travel to the mainland. Yet such measures are likely to further antagonise people.

In the short term there is likely to be more street activism – probably “shopping trips” by protesters, who roam the busy pavements of areas such as Mong Kok shouting slogans, and perhaps boycotts, sit-ins and other measures. Small clusters of protesters still milled around Admiralty and a secondary, minor site at Causeway Bay on Thursday night, while a few had moved their tents to a park in Wanchai.

On the government side, there will be a second public consultation on the plans for the election of the next chief executive in 2017. Protesters say Beijing has in effect reneged on its promise of universal suffrage by making clear that candidates will be tightly controlled by a committee stacked with pro-Beijing figures. That is merely “fake” or “Iranian-style” democracy, they say.

Pan-democrats, as the opposition in Hong Kong politics are known, have vowed to veto the proposals if they come before the Legislative Council in their current form, and no one believes that China will back down by allowing open nominations. But Hung said Beijing could give a token concession – for example, by tweaking the make-up of the nominating committee – giving cover to a handful of democratic legislators to vote for the bill.

Some think that China can afford to let the bill fall: it can say it has done its part by offering universal suffrage to Hong Kong, only for the offer to be rejected.

Hung disagrees: “Beijing wants to get it passed, because once it has passed the whole issue that defines the democratic camp looks like it’s over: the issue of universal suffrage is settled.

“It keeps the democratic movement going if they veto it ... It still gives people hope that Beijing will eventually give another [better] proposal.”

Polls show that as the occupation dragged on, it lost much of the public sympathy it had garnered in its early stages. Yet the underlying demand for greater democratic rights is still evident.

Michael Davis, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: “The government may be inclined to think it won when they cleared the streets tonight, but that would be wrong … The government has lost the public’s trust. [And] they have made the world very conscious of what’s going on here.

“The democrats haven’t lost anything because they didn’t have anything. The whole process has united them in a way they haven’t been for years; being in permanent opposition had meant a lot of fissures in the democratic camp.”

Davis, like many other residents, sees it as an awakening for Hong Kong – though not all sudden upsurges in political action result in long-term shifts.

It will take decades for the real struggle to play out. Though the protests were sparked by the electoral reform proposals, they were fuelled by concern that the existing freedoms and rights enjoyed by residents under the “one country, two systems” framework are imperilled by Beijing’s tightening grip, and that migration and closer integration with the mainland are wearing away its culture.

Even those who do not care greatly about gaining the ability to choose the chief executive may value the independence of their courts, for instance. Yet this summer a white paper from Beijing said that local judges should be “patriotic”, alarming many in the territory.

Beijing seems determined to make itself felt – but each such move sparks a backlash, in particular among the younger generation, who are more likely to identify as “Hong Kong people” than “Chinese”.

When the former British colony was handed back in 1997, few anticipated how much the region’s identity would change – and how little the mainland would shift politically. That has created an apparently irreconcilable tension.

“A hard line on Hong Kong might eventually be able to keep the middle and upper class in line,” predicted Hung, “but it can never contain the resistance of the younger generation.”