Barefaced cheek

Hu Huakai bolted out of a blue Ford sedan, wearing nothing but a white loincloth. He ran through a throng of students for about 50m and removed the cloth before dashing back, said "thank you" to the crowd and disappeared into the waiting car.

The whole episode lasted just a few minutes. Some onlookers did not even realize what had just happened. It was shortly after 9 pm on Nov 5 and the scene was a street outside a college campus in Hangzhou, eastern China's Zhejiang province.

Hu is a senior at Zhejiang Gongshang University. He was not happy that school authorities shut off the power at 11:30 pm and the streak was a kind of protest. In press interviews afterward, Hu added the protest was not just about the power being switched off, but the education system as a whole.