Near the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, a banner until recently draped from a bridge carried an image of an apparently unimposing teenager dressed as Batman. The emblem adorning the slight youth’s chest was not a bat but an umbrella — a symbol of the pro-democracy battle students have been waging against the Chinese Communist party.

The modern-day caped crusader is Joshua Wong. The 18-year-old university student is the leader of Scholarism, one of two student groups behind the Umbrella revolution named for the parasols demonstrators used to shield themselves from police tear gas.

For two months, the world has watched protesters transform Hong Kong from a city preoccupied with luxury shopping and property prices into a centre of resistance against Beijing’s efforts to impose an ever-tighter grip on its outpost. Mr Wong has played a lead role. His move to storm government headquarters in September in protest at a Chinese plan for electoral reform in the former British colony helped spark the biggest political challenge to the city’s leadership since control was handed over in 1997.