For any fans of 80's Asian history: a recollection of a precursor to the Chinese Student Protests.

There were multiple racially motivated attacks against African students between 1985 and 1986, and the Chinese police would arrive but not protect the students. In 1988, officials in Hehai University built a wall around the foreign students hall, ostensibly to protect against theft, but actually to ensure that African students did not bring Chinese women to their rooms. When the African students knocked down the wall, the university officials informed them that funds from their stipend would be docked in order to pay for the damages, and the students staged demonstrations. It was during this tumult that the university decided on December 24, the day of the Christmas Eve dance, that all foreign students must register their guests at the university gate. Two African students, from Benin and Liberia, wanted to bring two Chinese girls with them to the dance, and went to the main gate at Hehai. After that, what actually happened is bitterly disputed, as illustrated by two passages in Michael Sullivan’s article:

[T]he entrance guard asked the two girls to register, the two African students and refused to let them do so. At that point, several other African students came over and started a quarrel with the entrance guard. In the ensuing brawl, eleven staff members were injured, one of them seriously, including a university vice-president who had one of his ribs broken when he tried to persuade the combatants to stop fighting.

The African students … claim that the security guard permitted them and their guests to enter the campus after he saw the women’s Hong Kong passports. When the Benin student later returned to the front gate to wait for another Chinese friend, a group of heckling Chinese students attacked him, chanting “Black Devil, you must respect the laws of China!” and “What do you want, Black Devil?” The African students then ran to the foreign students’ hall to inform their friends of this attack after which several African students “began to arm themselves with wooden sticks, empty Jinling beer bottles and stones.”

African students faced difficult choices some 30 years later. Kaiser Kuo had been in Beijing during that winter and had heard about the protests, and he graciously took to the time to share his recollections in a personal email correspondence, from Washington DC, on December 20th, 2012:

I was actually in Beijing in the winter of 1988-1989, not in Nanjing, but there were some anti-African protests that spread to Beijing as well, and there was (back in those days, without the Internet or any more reliable means of transmission) all sorts of confusion as to where the actual events took place to spark anti-African demonstrations …

… We kept hearing stories, filtered of course through a very unsympathetic international student crowd, that they started simply because some African students in Nanjing (other versions said Hangzhou, and sometimes these stories were repeated with Beijing as the setting) had taken some Chinese girls to a dance and weren’t allowed in, or had trouble with the security or with male Chinese students at the door. These stories escalated into tales about fistfights, about sexual assaults, even about a woman who was supposed to have been (in the exact words I was told) “fucked to death” by African men whose penises were too large for her, so she bled out. I was very skeptical, and was horrified when there were actual marches in Beijing protesting against African students.

Incidentally, there appeared to be a connection between the Nanjing Anti-African Protests and Tiananmen in 1989, as it fused nationalism, racism, gender and youth movement into a powerful force.

Note: this is from an article pushing back against "anti-black violence in China."