Blogger Andres Gentry reports three Japanese students and a Japanese teacher at an evening party offended the Chinese students, leading to violence and demonstrations, (he provides more info in the comments.)
University students in Xi'an are currently in lock down: they have been quarantined in their dormitories and those students caught outside campus at the time of the lock down are being brought back to their dormitories. .... At a party at Northwest University to welcome this year's freshmen, four Japanese, one teacher and three students, insulted China. At the party they performed a blue dance and made the mistake of wearing shirts with "Zhongguoren" (Chinese people) on them. None of the Chinese in the audience took the insult kindly. ... All of this is single-source and as I no longer live in Xi'an I was not witness to these events. ... I've got more information on what happened and the as-of-now official response of the government. At the end of the day, no one looks good.Apparently, one of the Japanese students was a female who was wearing the Chinese flag on her ass. The others were wearing shirts with big penises on the front and when they turned around there was "What are you looking at you Chinese?" written on their backs.
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The four weren't allowed to finish their "dance performance" because sufficiently irate Chinese students jumped on the stage and had to be restrained from attacking them.
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In the last two days there have been attempts by Northwest students to contact the other universities in Xi'an to get more students out on the streets, which is why all the schools have been locked down.
Sounds like an amazing display of bad taste that blew up into a city wide problem.
The story is now up on Xinhua here.
DC