Students, drugs and rock and roll: Chinese students held for taking drugs after raid on famed Beijing music school
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 26 November, 2015, 4:47pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 26 November, 2015, 4:49pm
Sidney Leng
[email protected]
Students attend a class at China’s Beijing Midi School of Music. Photo: Mask9.com
Chinese police raided a music school in Beijing on Wednesday night, taking away dozens of students after they allegedly failed urine tests for drugs, news portal Sohu reported.
A verified Weibo account of a rock music podcast first broke the news when it reported that residents’ complaints had led police to raid Beijing Midi School of Music, where students, aged 18 to 20, were allegedly taking drugs.
The school’s principal Zhang Fan later confirmed that around 300 students were required by police to take urine tests for drugs and that about a dozen of those who were taken away returned to school yesterday.
“Midi has very strict rules of living at school … Students will be punished for even smoking in their dormitories,” Zhang told Tencent News, which also reported the incident.
“Students taking marijuana is definitely not good, but we have to give them chances to rectify their mistakes … music is a good cure.”
Zhang said if his students had tried marijuana out of curiosity, detention was an inappropriate way to deal with their mistake. The school would educate the students instead of punishing them, he said.
Over the past year, Chinese police have caught and detained many celebrities who took drugs, subjecting them to heavy penalties, such as forbidding them to perform in public or in television programmes and films – some permanently.
The Beijing Midi School of Music is China’s first official modern music school. It was founded in 1993 by Zhang, who used to work in the music industry. The school is known for its annual Midi Music Festival, one of the mainland’s largest rock events.
Zhang said the raid would not affect the festival, usually held in May, as drugs were strictly forbidden at the event.
