BEIJING — After months of relative restraint, China’s Communist government this week took its most decisive steps to intervene in Hong Kong’s political crisis, signaling a more forceful response that could further inflame tensions in the Chinese territory.

China’s top legislative body, the National People’s Congress, warned that it would use its authority, if necessary, to overrule the territory’s judiciary. It followed a Hong Kong court’s ruling on Monday overturning a contentious ban on wearing face masks, which protesters have used to shield their identities from the police.

The warning struck at the very heart of what has fueled the unrest, a concern about Beijing’s encroachment on Hong Kong. The protests began in June over another legal issue: legislation allowing the extradition of criminal defendants into the opaque and notoriously injudicious judicial system of the mainland.

While the bill has since been withdrawn, Beijing has not yielded an inch from its view that the Communist Party remains the ultimate arbiter of justice. That position is especially fraught for Hong Kong, where the court system has been a defining feature of the “one country, two systems” arrangement that promises the territory significant autonomy.

“It represents a new stage in Hong Kong’s protest movement,” Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing, said of the warning from the National People’s Congress, a body that functions as a rubber stamp of the party’s policy agenda. “It has reached the stage of a very direct conflict over sovereignty.”

Although Chinese officials have intensified their denunciations of the protesters as extremists and even blamed the “black hands” of western nations in stoking unrest, they have until now largely left the handling of the crisis to the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam. Now, Beijing’s patience appears to be wearing out.

Last week, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, toughened his tone. Mr. Xi, who has stirred internal rumblings over the handling of the protests, declared during a visit to Brazil that “the most urgent task” in Hong Kong was “to halt the violence and chaos and to restore order.”

A more aggressive strategy is not without risks for Beijing. The protests have left thousands injured, caused significant material and economic damage, and resulted in the arrest of about 700 people during a siege at one campus this week. It has also rattled international confidence in Hong Kong’s unique financial and political status since Britain returned sovereignty to the mainland in 1997.

The warning from the National People’s Congress affirmed fears that Beijing is bent on steadily increasing its influence over the territory’s affairs, abandoning its promises to preserve the city’s distinct historical, political and cultural characteristics. On Tuesday, the United States Senate unanimously passed legislation that could authorize the government to impose sanctions on officials responsible for human rights abuses in the territory.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the bill, saying it “interferes in China’s internal affairs” and violates the norms of international law and relations.

The Hong Kong government said the bill was “unnecessary and unwarranted” and would damage Hong Kong’s relationship with the United States.

The increasingly barbaric convulsions of violence on both sides have changed the calculus in Beijing, which has been telegraphing a potentially harder line.

When a garrison of the People’s Liberation Army in Hong Kong sent unarmed soldiers out of their barracks to help clean up debris from a street on Saturday, some of them wore shirts identifying them as members of a counterterrorism unit normally based on the mainland.

In August, the Chinese military sent thousands of new troops into the city as part of what it called an annual rotation. China has never confirmed the total number of mainland soldiers in the territory, raising fears that it has quietly bolstered the force.

In some ways, the protesters’ use of increasingly creative makeshift weapons, including bows and arrows, slingshots and explosives, has played into China’s narrative. The state media has used images from the streets as evidence of the spiraling dangers of unchecked popular protests, which are banned on the mainland.

“The violent crimes are a ‘virus’ threatening Hong Kong society and a common enemy that is a scourge to all humankind,” The People’s Daily, the chief newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote in an editorial on its front page on Tuesday. “The savagery of the Hong Kong rioters has already transgressed the bottom line of human morality and civilization, and no country or civilized society would ever permit it.”

That a court in Hong Kong would overturn an emergency decree by the executive branch — something inconceivable in China — stoked similar outpourings of outrage in China’s choreographed state media.

In a statement released the morning after the ruling, a spokesman for the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Zang Tiewei, said overturning the mask ban had “seriously weakened the lawful governing power” of Hong Kong’s government. He went on to say that the ruling did not comply with the Basic Law, the constitution-like document that governs relations between the territory and the central government.

The legislature has not moved to overturn the ruling — yet. Still, it strongly indicated that the government in Beijing, not the courts, should decide matters of national security.

The court’s decision “triggered totally malign consequences,” the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, said on Tuesday in an editorial welcoming the decision by the state to intervene. “It gave encouragement to the rioters and left the Hong Kong police force bewildered.”

Article 158 of the Basic Law does give the Congress the authority to interpret whether Hong Kong’s legal affairs comply with national law, but typically it has only acted when the courts there have sought such interpretations.

Julian G. Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law in New York, said in an emailed message that the statements pre-empted the normal review process. It suggested that Beijing worried that the highest judicial body, the Court of Final Appeal, could also rule against the mask ban.

“Issuing what looks like a news release before issuing an interpretation seems presumptuous and maybe a little panicky,” he said.

It is exactly things like this — a ruling by an independent court — that protesters say they are now fighting for on the streets.

“It will completely destroy ‘One Country, Two Systems’ separation of powers and rule of law,” Dennis Kwok, a pro-democracy lawmaker who represents Hong Kong’s legal sector, said of a move by the National People’s Congress. “So many Basic Law provisions are at stake here.”

Whatever happens next — whether Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal reverses the reversal, or Beijing overrides the courts — will be viewed as more evidence of the Communist government’s push to impose greater and greater control over the city’s affairs.

After all that has happened, that might be the point.

On the same day as the warning to Hong Kong’s judiciary, the State Council in Beijing announced that it had approved the appointment of a new police chief in Hong Kong — another reminder that the central government has the final say. Tang Ping-Keung, the new chief, has trained and studied extensively in the mainland, as well as at the F.B.I.’s academy in Quantico, Va.

Wei Leijie, a law professor at Xiamen University in southeastern China, said that the political crisis in Hong Kong had reached a level obliging the authorities to consider stronger measures.

“Soft things need to be hardened,” he said, “and the hard things should be made more specific.”

Chris Buckley in Beijing and Elaine Yu and Tiffany May in Hong Kong contributed reporting. Claire Fu and Amber Wang in Beijing contributed research.

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