Hundreds of students in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin gathered on the Tianjin University campus late on Thursday, in protest at COVID-19 restrictions.
Chanting “Down with formalism! Down with bureaucracy!”, the students gathered on the university’s Beiyang Square, calling on university leaders to come out and talk to them about arrangement for classes and exams amid ongoing zero-COVID restrictions.
The scenes were eerily reminiscent of the early stages of the 1989 student movement, which later took over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for weeks on end with demands for democratic reforms and the rule of law.
Those protests culminated in a bloody massacre of civilians by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the night of June 3-4, with an unknown number of casualties.
Students are calling on the university administration to clarifying…
