student power

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. On 4th June 1989, what started as a peaceful protest by Beijing students evolved into a bloody crackdown by the People's Liberation Army. While I do have my views on the incident, but this humble blog of mine doesn't seem to be an appropriate channel to talk about it. So let's talk about students.

The students who led the movement were just into their 20s. Yet they were able to mobilize the masses, including workers and Beijing residents. Putting the question of maturity aside, I can't help feeling that students from other countries seem to take things into their hands instead of blindly accepting with both hands. There is this joke about European students learning about vibration and resonance frequency by shaking police patrol car during riots. Students leaders in other countries seem to be quite active in both social and political arena. They do things like petition when their university decides to award honorary degree to human rights violators or when the government rolls out some unpopular reform. Just recently, the former president of the Hong Kong University Student Union got himself all famous in the news media just because he openly questioned the student movement of 1989. And he got deposed.

In contrast, the tertiary students in Singapore seem to be politically indifferent/ignorant. I'm not trying to say we should go back to the days of Chinese middle school riots, maybe our society is so peaceful there is just no reason to be upset about. (Orly?) Well at least I'm glad we have access to information (just whether we want to access or not). They distribute Epoch Times alongside Financial Times in campus. The rest is up to your brains to decide which one to pick up from the stand. Usually students rather pay to get The New Paper for the soccer news.

But the student leaders here do know how to rally for student support when someone goes into Singapore Idol.