Thursday was a traditional Chinese holiday that follows a lunar calendar, and it coincidentally came right after the National Day holiday this year. As a result, many people had expected the rallies to remain just as large on Thursday as on Wednesday.

Demonstrators were making a bigger effort by midmorning Thursday to minimize their disruption to commerce. Ken Lee, a 17-year-old hotel worker, sat on a gray plastic stool next to a row of safety cones — commandeered earlier from the police — that partly blocked the entrance to Queens Road, an important commercial street in Hong Kong. He explained that he was supposed to remove the cones not just for emergency vehicles that might come along, but also for delivery vehicles. Moments later, a newspaper deliveryman on a bicycle and a large bakery truck appeared. Mr. Lee politely moved the cones. The city’s leadership has concluded that it would be pointless for Mr. Leung to sit down with protest leaders, although a few informal contacts have been made with democracy advocates and a few of Mr. Leung’s friends have recommended negotiations. Beijing has given the Hong Kong government only a little room to negotiate the details of how the next chief executive will be elected in 2017 — the fundamental issue for the demonstrators.

“The government can tolerate the blockade of three or four or five areas and see how the demonstrations go, so the only way the demonstrators can go is to escalate it — spread it to more places, and then they cannot sustain it — or they will become violent,” said a person who is involved in the Hong Kong government’s decision-making.

An adviser to the government said the officials believed that Mr. Leung should bide his time. “The consensus is to wait and patiently deal with the crisis — it is not easy, but we shall do our best to resolve it peacefully,” the adviser said.

The strategy carries risks for the local and national governments because it in effect cedes momentum to the protesters and allows them to drive events. For China, continuing protests could inspire more dissent on the mainland, despite its censors’ attempts to block discussion of the events. Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, said Wednesday that China had already detained or intimidated dozens of people for perceived transgressions like expressing support for the protesters on social media.

For the Hong Kong government, the risk is that the city’s image as a stable financial center will be harmed and that the government’s intransigence, rather than the protesters’ actions, will be blamed for the disruption.