If nearly six months of increasingly disruptive and violent demonstrations in Hong Kong haven’t sent the Chinese government a clear enough message about how the city’s residents feel about democracy, Sunday’s landslide victory by pro-democracy forces in elections for district councils should erase any doubts.

The councils, which dea l with mundane local issues, are not particularly important institutions in Hong Kong, which remains a semiautonomous enclave according to the agreement by which Britain ceded it to China. That’s probably why China left the councils open to free elections. The pro-democracy forces — for lack of a more formal name, since they have no single organization — turned the elections into a referendum on their grass-roots movement.

The results were unequivocal. More than 70 percent of eligible voters turned out, a record for Hong Kong, and pro-democracy candidates swept up 389 of 452 elected seats, effectively taking control of 17 of 18 district councils, all of which had been under pro-establishment control.

That may not mean much in terms of real power, but the main significance was that China’s Communist leaders could no longer believe, or claim, that the demonstrations were the work of hooligans directed from abroad. If the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping had thought that there was a silent majority opposed to the disruptive protests, the turnout and result made clear that a vast majority of Hong Kongers treasure their relative freedoms and have no intention of letting Beijing whittle them away.