spilence
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On 24 December 1988, two male African students were entering their campus at Hohai University in Nanjing with two Chinese women. The occasion was a Christmas Eve party. A quarrel between one of the Africans and a Chinese security guard, who had suspected that the women the African students tried to bring into the campus were prostitutes and refused their entry, led to a brawl between all the African and Chinese students on the campus which lasted till the morning, leaving 13 students injured. The brawl included other African students besides the two stopped by the security guards.[1]
300 Chinese students, spurred by false rumors that a Chinese man had been killed by the Africans, broke into and set about destroying the Africans' dormitories, shouting slogans.[2]
By this time, Chinese students from Hohai University had joined up with students from other Nanjing universities to make up a 3,000-strong demonstration that called on government officials to prosecute the African students and reform the system which gave foreign students more rights than Chinese students.
The Nanjing protests were groundbreaking dissidence for China and went from solely expressing concern about alleged improprieties by African men to increasingly calling for democracy or human rights. They were paralleled by burgeoning demonstrations in other cities during the period between the Nanjing and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, with some elements of the original protests that started in Nanjing still evident in 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, such as banners proclaiming "Stop Taking Advantage of Chinese Women" even though the vast majority of African students had left the country by that point.[7][8][9]