We called it the Yonsei Beach Club. It convened the last time South Koreans exploded in protest and forced a government to capitulate, in 1987, when a small band of reporters and photographers would assemble to chronicle the daily demonstrations by students at Yonsei University in Seoul.

Then as now, mass protest was a powerful weapon deployed by enraged citizens who felt they had nowhere else to turn but the streets. Thirty years later, it’s clear how far Korean democracy has advanced. Then, South Korea was a dictatorship, protests were outlawed and the threat of torture, imprisonment and martial law ever-present.

The emblem of the Beach Club was a gas mask, because the throngs of riot police in Darth Vader masks lobbed tear gas canisters at students whose weapons were moral force, rocks and homemade firebombs.

Students have long been at the vanguard of South Korea’s robust history of protest, drawing on deep-rooted Confucian traditions that elevated scholars as guardians of morality. They helped topple a government in 1960 and rebelled in the southern city of Kwangju in 1980, only to be massacred by a military junta led by Chun Doo-hwan, who later made himself president.