Up close and personal: Protesting students use graduation ceremony to show Carrie Lam how they feel

Student protests nearby and against Carrie Lam. Picture: YouTube.
Student protests nearby and against Carrie Lam. Picture: YouTube.

It was a good ol’ Lambasting.

Graduating students at Lingnan University gave the city’s leader a personal piece of their minds yesterday, protesting all up in her face as they received their master’s degrees from the public liberal arts institution.

Carrie Lam, under arrangements from colonial times, sits as the chancellor of publicly-funded universities in Hong Kong, Hong Kong International Business Channel reported.

And sit, she did, as students from the Cultural Studies Department walked on stage, took their degrees and gave, in return, their opinions on the chief executive’s policies.

“Oppose land reclamation,” said one, depositing her protest poster on Lam’s, ah, wood-paneled judge’s desk-looking seat thingy.

“Don’t expand Lantau Island,” said another.




Lam, as is her lifelong bureaucrat nature, mostly kept a straight face as several students marched past shouting slogans and waving banners.

The graduating students — as well as protesters seated in the audience — mostly rallied against government plans to spend hundred of millions of dollars to create artificial islands off the coast of Lantau island.

Students were also seen unfurling banners from their seats and chanting slogans supporting the three leading Hong Kong democracy campaigners who are in court facing public nuisance charges in relation to the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests.

Some students and graduates also protested Lam’s decision to re-appoint Junius Ho — a controversial pro-Beijing lawmaker who at one point said all independence activists should be killed — to the university’s governing council.

None of the young’uns said anything about independence which, we can only imagine, may have caused calm Carrie to tackle them to the ground, shouting “red line!”



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