無知な者が政治的活動することは悲劇である。そんな悲劇を良く見かける。だが通常、政治的活動をする人物はその裏に理由があり、ロジックや知識と勇気がある。また世界を住み良くしようとする世界愛に満ちている。グローバルに活躍する、あるいはできるアーテストは世界の「心の灯台」になることを期待されている。それは無名な政治家よりも世界にあたえる影響力があるという現実があるからであろう。政治的になることは売れっ子のアーティストにとってビジネスに大きなマイナスであることは、この記事からもはっきり見てとれる。とくにイスラエルとパレスチニアの紛争は歴史が長く、複雑であり、双方の不信感は絶大なため、まったく解決の糸口さえ見つからない状態。その不信感とはどんなものか。たとえば故PLO議長、アラハト（Yasser Arafat）はその紛争の解決のための柔軟な姿勢や和平協定交渉努力が認められてノーベル平和賞を受賞した。だが、それはたんなる表向きの飾りに過ぎなかったことがのちに暴露されることになる。議会制民主主義のイスラエルとイスラム教のパレスチニアどっちにつくかで意見がはっきり別れる。それは様々な国の様々なレベルの人々に問題が波及することが、この記事の中にある。ただ一つはっきり言えることは、そうしたビジネスにマイナスになっても、敢えてアーテストたちは政治的になる。つまり、どちらかの側を取る。そのアーテストにとってお金を稼ぐよりも、もっと大切なものがあるということを示しているのである。
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Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (born 7 November 1996), known professionally as Lorde is a New Zealand singer, songwriter, and record producer, I copied and pasted here from Wikipedia.
In December 2017, Lorde cancelled her scheduled June concert in Israel following an online campaign by Palestinian solidarity activists supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. This online campaign included an open letter published on The Spinoff online magazine by both the Jewish New Zealander activist Justine Sachs and the Palestinian New Zealander activist Nadia Abu-Shanab urging Lorde to cancel her Israel tour, citing "Israeli government's policies of oppression, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, occupation and apartheid." Lorde also issued a statement on Twitter thanking her fans for educating her about Israel-Palestine, and saying "I'm not too proud to admit I didn't make the right call [by booking this tour]."
Lorde's cancellation of her Israeli tour was welcomed by Palestinian activists and supporters including the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the New Zealand Jewish pro-boycott group Dayenu; of which Sachs was a founding member. By contrast, Lorde's actions were criticised by pro-Israel groups and supporters including Shalom.Kiwi and the actress Roseanne Barr. The Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev and the Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand Itzhak Gerbeg also issued statements urging Lorde to reconsider her cancellation; with the latter inviting Lorde to meet him. American rabbi Shmuley Boteach paid for a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post, with the headline "Lorde and New Zealand ignore Syria to attack Israel", and called her a "bigot", noting that she will be touring Russia despite Putin's support for the Syrian regime.
In response to Boteach's poster, one hundred actors, writers, directors, and musicians including Roger Waters, John Cusack, Angela Davis, Mark Ruffalo, and Viggo Mortensen issued a joint letter on The Guardian defending Lorde's stand. On 31 January 2018, three Israeli teenagers sued the activists that wrote the open letter for "emotional damage" resulting from the concert's cancellation.
Lorde was scheduled to perform in Miami and Tampa Bay in April 2018. Based on anti-BDS legislation in Florida which bars companies that receive state funds from doing business over $1 million with organizations associated with BDS, Floridian law maker Randy Fine called for the cancellation of Lorde's upcoming April 2018 concerts in Florida saying that "When Lorde joined the boycott in December, she and her companies became subject to that statute. The taxpayers of Miami and Tampa should not have to facilitate bigotry and anti-Semitism, and I look forward to the Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority and the Tampa Sports Authority complying with the law and canceling these concerts."
In 1986, at the age of fifty-eight, Romanian-born Jewish-American writer and political activist Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928–July 2, 2016) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee called him a “messenger to mankind.” Wiesel lived up to that moniker with exquisite eloquence on December 10 that year ― exactly ninety years after Alfred Nobel died ― as he took the stage at Norway’s Oslo City Hall and delivered a spectacular speech on justice, oppression, and our individual responsibility in our shared freedom. The address was eventually included in Elie Wiesel: Messenger for Peace (public library).
“I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: “Can this be true?” This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: “Tell me,” he asks. “What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?”
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must ― at that moment ― become the center of the universe.”
Japan
'It's exhilarating': Japan's female sumo wrestlers take on sexism
Amateur wrestlers hope ban on women in the professional arena will one day be overturned
Justin McCurry in Gifu Mon 18 Jun 2018 20.04 EDT Last modified on Mon 18 Jun 2018 23.51 EDT
Eight of the current nine members of the Asahi University women sumo team pose for a group photo by the Dohyo Photograph: Laura Liverani for the Guardian
It isn’t hard to see why Chisaki Okumura is one of Japan’s best female sumo wrestlers. Combining her considerable height and heft with flashes of speed, her practice bouts end with a succession of opponents thrown to the ground or shoved unceremoniously out of the ring.
On a humid, wet afternoon in central Japan, Okumura draws on her reserves of strength for a final, punishing series of drills with a male opponent. By the end, it is hard to tell who is more exhausted.
For more than two hours every weekday afternoon, the 17 men and nine women of Asahi University’s sumo club stretch, warm up and perform drills together, although for safety reasons they conduct full-on bouts separately.
Training is centered on two dohyo – a dirt-covered 4.55m diameter circle marked out with half-buried rice-straw bales - which are among the few places where female sumo wrestlers are defying the centuries-old sport’s uneasy relationship with gender.
Pic=A female and a male member of the Asahi University sumo team practice against each other during their daily training. Photograph: Laura Liverani for the
As amateurs, the women athletes at Asahi and other universities are not bound by the ancient traditions governing professional sumo - in which only men can compete. But that might not be the case for much longer.
Many hope the ban on women joining the professional sumo ranks will one day be overturned, proving that deep-seated misogyny has no place in a sport striving to be accepted as an Olympic event.
In April, not long after professional sumo was rocked again by allegations of bullying and violence, an incident at an exhibition tournament in Maizuru, near Kyoto, triggered a new campaign to rid Japan’s de facto national sport of its sexist traditions.
The row was triggered by after several women, including at least one nurse, rushed on to the ring to administer first aid to the local mayor, who had collapsed after suffering a stroke. Using the public address system, the referee repeatedly ordered them to leave the ring, but the women refused.
Officials sprinkled “purifying” salt on the wrestling surface after they had left. Sumo officials later denied that this had been done because of the women’s presence in the ring. Salt is customarily scattered on the ring before bouts and after a wrestler has been injured.
The impromptu first responders had fallen foul of an ancient rule banning women from entering, or even touching, the dohyo.
The rule has prevented local female politicians from presenting awards inside the ring.
The Maizuru incident not only embarrassed sumo but was also seen as a metaphor for the treatment of women in Japan, which performs poorly in global tables of gender equality and female political representation.
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Tomoko Nakagawa, the mayor of Takarazuka in western Japan, has unsuccessfully petitioned the Japan sumo association to lift the ban. “I can’t understand why it is only the sumo world that refuses to change or is even going backwards,” she told Agence France-Presse.
The sport’s struggle with sexism is equally baffling to Okumura, who has been wrestling since she was at middle school.
“Sumo shouldn’t be thought of as a sport for men and women, it’s for everyone,” says Okumura, runner-up in last month’s international women’s sumo invitational championships in the 64-80kg category.
“I definitely benefit from being able to train with the men, and I don’t get the impression that they’re looking down on me and the other women. If I were allowed to compete against them in a proper bout I think I could hold my own.”
The Asahi club was formed eight years ago and is now one of about half a dozen women’s sumo clubs at Japanese universities. The female members use the same number of kimarite – or winning moves – as the men, but wear their mawashi belts over shorts and T-shirts.
“There are some people who still struggle to accept the idea of women’s sumo, but I’ve never thought it was at all unusual,” says Shigeto Takahashi, the club’s manager, who has been coaching female wrestlers for 35 years. “The only real difference is that the women have to be a little more careful about injuring their shoulders, but they’re not allowed to wear any padding.”
Kaori Matsui, an associate professor in the university’s department of health and sports sciences, and the club’s deputy manager, said it was natural for women to compete in sumo, having already broken down barriers in other contact sports such as wrestling and judo.
Pic=Two members of the Asahi University women sumo team go through their routine training, practicing Shiko, or foot stomping. Photograph: Laura Liverani
The number of new women taking up amateur sumo is static, however, a problem she blames on the dearth of female coaches to offer guidance to girls and young women.
“Some people I meet are amazed that there is even an international women’s sumo scene,” she says. “There needs to be a more coordinated approach to promoting the brilliance of women’s sumo. When you watch it close up, it’s exhilarating.”
While weary wrestlers gulp down cups of cold tea from a copper kettle, Minayo Nishimoto shows few signs of fatigue - unsurprising, perhaps, for a woman who has been hurling her comparatively slight frame around sumo rings since she was nine years old.
“I understand that the dohyo is regarded as sacred, but whichever way you look at it, the ban on women is sexist,” says Nishimoto, who prides herself on her uwatenage overarm throw. “But that just makes me all the more determined to carry on and be the best female wrestler in Japan.”
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Japanese Medical School Accused of Rigging Admissions to Keep Women Out
Aug. 3, 2018 By Austin Ramzy and Hisako Ueno
A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.
The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.
Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Thursday.
For the 2018 school year, 1,596 men and 1,018 women applied to the school, with 8.8 percent of men and 2.9 percent of women accepted, according to the newspaper.
“This medical school’s practice is very shocking and ridiculous,” said Dr. Takako Tsuda, an anesthesiologist who is chairwoman of the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women. “This practice should be stopped now.”
Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan’s education minister, ordered an investigation into the school’s admissions procedures over the last six years.
“Discriminating against female students in entrance exams is absolutely unacceptable,” Mr. Hayashi told reporters on Thursday.
The discrimination began after 2010, when the number of successful female applicants increased sharply, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The newspaper quoted an unnamed source as saying that school administrators justified the practice out of the belief that women were more likely to drop out of the profession after marriage or childbirth.
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TBS, a television network, cited an unnamed former university admissions official as saying the practice was commonplace among medical schools and that administrators did not see anything wrong with it.
A university spokesman declined to comment.
The revelations triggered an outpouring of criticism online about gender inequality in Japan.
“Those who decided this system never faced problems of balancing housework and child care with a job,” Keiko Ota, a lawyer, said on Twitter. “You got away without doing all that housework and were able to concentrate on just your job thanks to whom? Can you dare say with whom you left your own children?”
Mizuho Fukushima, a lawmaker with the Social Democrat Party, said the school’s practice was clearly a violation of constitutional protections against discrimination. “This is just unacceptable,” she tweeted. “Work-style reform for doctors and child care support should be carried out.”
The reported discrimination at Tokyo Medical University, a prestigious private school, came to light in an internal investigation following the arrest last month of two university officials. The officials are accused of bribery, alleged to have guaranteed admission to a bureaucrat’s son in exchange for state funding, Kyodo News reported.
The allegation that women’s test scores were manipulated has cast a sharp light on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s efforts to advance the economic empowerment of women, a policy known as “womenomics.”
Japan has lagged behind other developed nations on female participation in the workplace. This has been blamed, in part, on traditional hiring practices that emphasize lifelong employment with a single company. Japanese companies typically require long hours, which clashes with cultural expectations that women are responsible for the bulk of housekeeping and child-rearing responsibilities.
By one basic measurement, economic prospects for women in Japan have improved in recent years, as the proportion of women working has surpassed that in the United States. But women are poorly represented in high-paying and prestigious jobs in government, management and science and technology. As a result, the pay gap is still stubbornly wide.
Acceptance rates are higher for women than men in most university subjects in Japan, including engineering, agriculture, dentistry, nursing and pharmaceutical studies. But they trail in medicine, according to an analysis of Education Ministry statistics by Kyoko Tanebe of the Japan Joint Association of Medical Professional Women.
“These stats indicate universities control the student ratio,” Ms. Tanebe wrote last year.
Some people in the field said they had long suspected that women were being actively prevented from pursuing careers in medicine.
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戦後はもう終わったなんて言葉が昔はやったが、右翼軍国主義、天皇主義、全体主義国家から敗戦を経て、民主主義国家を前面に謳った日本国憲法が制定されてもう相当長きに渡る。ところが、民主主義や基本的人権や個人の幸福を追求する権利をまったく理解するには至っていないことがうかがわれる。それが教育者であってもである。わかってもいない日本国憲法がいまや戦前の右翼の懐古主義、天皇主義者をバックにして改憲の危険にさらされているという現実。いやはや、日本の運命はその体制が戦前に戻るのであろうか。
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Japan school boards start to rethink 'black rules' on everything from underwear to protesting
BY TOMOHIRO OSAKI, Japan Times Staff Writer
NOV 8, 2019
More and more municipalities in Japan are scrambling to amend or abolish what are widely criticized as draconian school rules long imposed on students, heralding a rethink of a long-standing teaching culture that has prized conformity and docility.
In the latest example, the board of education in Gifu Prefecture has run a sweeping review of rules upheld by high schools under its jurisdiction. Such rules, known as kōsoku, typically refer to internal codes of conduct that each junior high and high school imposes on pupils under their care, often dictating a strict dress code that extends to the length and color of their hair.
The investigation by the Gifu Prefectural Board of Education found that more than 90 percent of its 61 full-time high schools had maintained rules so stringent that they risked compromising the human rights of the students.
Examples included those that stipulated girls’ underclothes must be white, that students must notify schools in advance of their personal plans for long-distance travel, and that students must seek teachers’ permission to join any assembly outside of school hours, education board official Masayuki Ishigami said. “Assembly” is generally interpreted to include political rallies, although few explicitly state so, Ishigami added.
Although the board has already instructed schools to remove those rules, the changes will officially take effect at the beginning of the new school year in April, Ishigami said.
“At the very least, we felt it necessary to revise those school rules that affect students’ human rights,” Ishigami said. “For example, the mere act of teachers trying to check the color of underclothes worn by girls would raise human rights questions,” he said.
The official said Gifu’s review has been prompted by a recent groundswell of public outrage against the rigorous rules. Although long taken for granted as part of the education system, the tradition of kōsoku ignited debate when an 18-year-old girl sued Osaka Prefecture for damages in 2017 after she was repeatedly forced by her teachers to dye her naturally brown hair black as per a school rule.
Those overly restrictive rules are now commonly dubbed “black kōsoku.” In August, a group of campaigners seeking to eliminate them submitted an online petition signed by more than 60,000 people to the education ministry urging immediate action. Osaka Prefecture, too, took steps to address the issue, ordering all of its high schools to review their rules. As a result, about 40 percent of its 135 full-time high schools made changes, the prefectural government said in a report in April last year.
Japan began keeping a tighter rein on students when the nation went through a drastic increase in juvenile delinquency and violence against teachers in the early 1980s, prompting school authorities to stiffen rules in a bid to curb rowdy behavior, education studies scholar Masaharu Hata wrote in a 1999 book.
But despite recent moves by municipalities to rethink their long-held codes of conduct, progress has moved at a glacial pace because many teachers still prize them as a form of education, said Ryo Uchida, an associate professor of Nagoya University who has written multiple books on school-related issues.
“The biggest objective of Japanese teachers is to keep their classes as orderly as possible and without any incident, and the most common way to achieve that has been to limit students’ freedom,” Uchida said.
Uchida said schools are “almost as though they were granted extraterritoriality,” where even the most absurd rules, such as banning students from wearing scarves and tights even in winter, are justified under the pretext of nipping delinquency in the bud.
“The logic is that if one student started showing off what might be considered a fashion accessory, other students may follow suit, which could encourage overall disorderliness,” Uchida said. “But how could denying students the simplest choices such as wearing something because of cold weather possibly help foster their independence and self-initiative?”
Going forward, the associate professor said the most effective antidote to black kōsoku is for education boards in each municipality to take steps to disclose the details of these internal school rules so they can be checked against the “common sense of the outside world.”
“Only then will the black kōsoku die off,” Uchida said.
Indeed, Setagaya Ward in Tokyo is gearing up to do just that. Its education board is currently in the “final phase” of its plan to make public a list of rules upheld by all of its junior high schools on their respective websites, having conducted a comprehensive update of any inappropriate code.
“Our big objective is to eliminate any unreasonable kōsoku for the sake of children’s human rights,” Setagaya Education Board official Yuji Aoki said. “We also believe that children should be left to make their own decisions about how they should act, not governed by a long list of rules, in order to harness their autonomy in these changing times.”
It is under this belief that all public junior high schools in Setagaya now allow their students to go to school wearing the clothes of their choice once a month — although some locals have argued such an initiative is inappropriate for junior high school students, Aoki said.
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いま注目を集めている、混乱が続く香港。サッチャー政権のイギリスと中国共産党との協定を守らせようとする、香港市民による民主的生活維持運動。その舞台が街頭から香港の各大学へと移っている。中国共産党/警察当局が学生をターゲットにし始めたからに他ならない。前にも書いたが、これらの大学は世界の大学ランキングでも100位以内の高く評価されている大学群だ。東大よりも高いランキングの大学が含まれる。いまやその激しさは、高経大の学生が始めた当初の民主化運動というよりも、過去の全共闘の頂点を示す東大闘争の様相を呈している観がある。もちろん、香港で起こっていることは共産主義国の民主化運動であって、自由主義国の共産主義運動とは違うし、比較にならないほどの修羅場であるが。いずれにせよ、なかなか目が離せない悲しい情勢なのは間違いない。
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The New York Times Report
Hong Kong Colleges Become Besieged Citadels as Police Close In
Police have begun raiding the edges of the biggest campuses to make arrests, leading student activists to engage with them in pitched battles that resemble medieval sieges.
By Edward Wong and Ezra Cheung
Nov. 13, 2019 Updated 8:28 p.m. ET
HONG KONG — Seething with anger, the black-clad students hurled gasoline bombs, threw bricks and even aimed flaming arrows at the riot police, who answered with tear-gas volleys and rubber bullets that hurtled into Hong Kong’s university grounds for the first time.
And with those battles on Monday and Tuesday at the territory’s largest universities, another unspoken rule in the antigovernment protests that have been convulsing Hong Kong for six months was shattered: the sanctity of educational campuses from the police.
The clashes turned what had been sanctuaries for the students at the core of the movement into scenes that evoked medieval citadels under siege.
They opened a new chapter that threatens to further disrupt the Asian financial capital, which has struggled for normalcy despite the increasingly violent protests against the Chinese Communist authorities in Beijing who have the last word over Hong Kong’s future.
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Hong Kong has fallen into recession as tourists have fled and as its busy shopping areas become backdrops for street battles between demonstrators and police officers. The world is asking hard questions about what could befall Hong Kong as Beijing further tightens control over a city that is supposed to operate under its own laws.
The most dramatic student-versus-police clash unfolded late Tuesday night at a barricaded bridge leading to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For hours, police officers fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and students hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks, and practiced firing bows with flaming arrows. More than 100 injured students were brought to a makeshift first-aid clinic in a gym.
By targeting campuses, the police have breached the last refuge of the protesters, a move that brings the violence to the heart of the universities and invokes the pivotal and fraught role of student activism in the global history of democracy movements.
“One thing that people have realized is that the protests, the movement, the conflict, is unavoidable,” Gabriel Fung, a 19-year-old second-year student at the University of Hong Kong, said. “It’s going to reach you wherever you are at some point.”
It is at these universities where young leaders and other students have been organizing revolts against the Chinese Communist Party and spreading the pro-democracy ideas that undergird the protests. And here, too, that the students discuss the wealth inequality and cultural homogenization that have led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation.
In Hong Kong, university administrators and professors now find themselves in a difficult position, trying to preach tolerance and walk a tightrope of furious demands from students, the police and government officials. Two schools on Wednesday ended their semesters weeks early.
“Not a single place in Hong Kong is exempt from the rule of law, and that includes universities,” John Lee, the secretary for security, said Wednesday at a news conference. “Universities are not supposed to be the breeding ground of violence.”
The showdown has been brewing for years, going back to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And the roots of the protests in many ways harken back to social movements elsewhere.
On mainland China, students have led campaigns calling for sweeping political change, notably in 1919 and 1989. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence broke out on campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, most horrifically at Kent State University in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students, killing four and injuring nine.
Student activists in Hong Kong have lived by an exhausting weekly rhythm since the movement began in early June: protest on weekends, show up on Mondays for class, study for exams and apply for internships or jobs in between it all. Many argue with parents who disagree with their politics or tactics. Hundreds have been arrested in recent months and quickly released by the police, as required by law.
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It was the death of a university student this month that set off the current round of protests and violence. Chow Tsz-lok, a student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, sustained a fatal injury after falling from a parking garage near a police action on Nov. 4. Thousands attended candlelit memorial rallies last weekend, and his photograph is on posters and makeshift shrines all over campuses, since he is now a martyr for other students.
Roiled by the latest unrest, universities canceled classes from Monday to Friday. That meant protesters have been able to hit the streets at dawn on weekdays after sleeping a few hours. On campus, activists have sprayed fresh graffiti, including phrases cursing administrators.
The fraught situation led police officers on Wednesday to organize an evacuation of dozens of mainland Chinese students across the border to Shenzhen, where hotels offered them free rooms.
One graduate student at the University of Hong Kong said he and others from the mainland still felt safer on campuses than on the streets. He said many students do not openly express pro-Beijing opinions and sometimes avoid speaking loudly in Mandarin, the dominant language back home. (He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tensions.)
Some university departments have delayed recruitment drives of mainland and foreign students to come up with new strategies; a drop-off in enrollment by mainland graduate students, who often pay full tuition, would lead to budget problems.
Hong Kong’s public universities, which have more than 86,000 undergraduate and nearly 11,000 graduate students, each have distinct characters. That means the students have occupied different roles in the movement, and the protests have played out in different ways on each campus.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with 20,000 students, is considered the most radical campus. Most of its students are Cantonese-speaking locals, some of whom live nearby with their parents in dense apartment blocks. And the campus is high in the hills of Sha Tin, isolated from the city center, which is an hour’s ride away by subway.
On Monday, the police arrested five students on the campus’s edge, administrators said. The next morning, the police, still at the border, confronted front line students, and clashes took place over 20 hours. Rocky S. Tuan, the president, who has been known for trying to engage with students during the movement, showed up during a lull in the evening to urge the students to be calm.
“You all should know that I really want to help you. I will do everything within my capability,” he said. “It is the university’s responsibility to maintain peace on campus, not the police.”
But as Mr. Tuan began walking away, the police fired tear gas. Mr. Tuan himself was enveloped in the gas. Students set fires to keep the police from advancing, and scores formed human chains to pass along bricks, umbrellas and bottled water to the front lines. Students sitting on one patch of road made gasoline bombs as if on an assembly line.
“It was a savage move and a type of police violence when they tried to encroach on the university,” said Timothy Chow, 23, an engineering student who graduated in June. “This is why we have to protect our Chinese University of Hong Kong.”
“When I saw our compatriots and Chinese University staff being hurt by the police, I felt particularly furious and wanted to come back to defend our university,” he added.
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