Leung opposed the government's constitutional package on the 2016/2017 Legislative Council and Chief Executive elections. After the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) set the restrictive framework on the Chief Executive candidates, the student activist groups organised a week-long student strike. On 26 September 2014 toward the end of the strike, 100 protesters led by student leader Joshua Wong rushed into the square of the government headquarters. The police clearance drew thousands of protesters at the scene. In the next morning, the Occupy Central with Peace and Love led by scholar Benny Tai announced their early launch of the planned occupy protests. Feeling being highjacked, some protesters began to leave the scene, while Leung Kwok-hung dropped to his knees in front of the protesters, asking them for staying in the scene. "If you want to achieve a goal in the long term – in this case, true democracy in Hong Kong – you need to unify all powers who are fighting for this goal and establish a platform to let them all participate", he later told the press. For his long term experiences in protests, he became one of the leaders in the 2014 Hong Kong protests and kept being seen in the scene, but he was criticised by some militant radicals for his non-violence doctrine.