Military-style squads swoop on kissing students on Chinese college campus
AChinese college has come under fire for deploying military-style monitors to crack down on couples who kiss and cuddle on campus.
The student patrols wear camouflaged uniforms as they march around Binzhou Vocational College, in the eastern Shandong province, where they threaten couples with being named and shamed for their behaviour.
The college sparked outrage on social media after a video went viral showing a trio of men wearing helmets and military attire confronting a couple who were embracing.
The Paper, a Shanghai-based news platform, quoted the college saying that the patrol had only sought to give the couple a warning, but that the male student "threw a fit".
A college official told the media outlet that the uniformed squads were responsible for clamping down on a range of "inappropriate behaviour", including smoking and dropping litter.
There were many comments on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, expressing outrage that touchy-feely couples were also under scrutiny.
"What a freak school!" said one. "The headmaster obviously doesn't have a happy marriage."
Another said: "College students can get married, so why can't they have romantic relationships."
It comes after another college in the city of Rizhao - which is also in Shandong province - came under fire last year for rolling out a campaign against kissing, cuddling and "uncivilised" behaviour.
Many in China remain deeply conservative and public affection is rare in the country.
But an adventurous generation of young, mainly urban Chinese are pushing back the frontiers of what is accepted, and attitudes are far removed from the puritan days of radical Communist rule that older generations lived under.
Calls by The Telegraph to Binzhou Vocational College went unanswered.
Additional reporting by Christine Wei