BEIJING -- New restrictions were imposed Thursday on African students' social relations with Chinese women at the eastern Nanjing university where nearly two weeks of racial unrest began.
The new regulations at Hehai University, site of a Christmas Eve brawl between Africans and Chinese that sparked anti-African street protests, limit each African exchange student to one Chinese girlfriend, African students said in telephone interviews from Nanjing.
African governments also intensified pressure on China to end racial unrest on numerous Chinese campuses as officials denied charges that police tortured and beat African students in Nanjing.
Authorities returned 44 African students to their dormitories at Hehai after the students staged a two-day hunger strike at a guest house outside Nanjing where they were taken Dec. 26 amid growing anti-African protests.
The students said new restrictions imposed by school officials, which forbid visits to their rooms by Chinese, were conditions for their return to Hehai.
'One of the conditions is that we cannot have more than one Chinese girlfriend and we must introduce her to all the members of the (Hehai) foreign affairs office,' said a student from Ghana, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Racial unrest in Nanjing grew out of a violent Christmas Eve clash at Hehai over a restrictive campus security policy that African students claimed limited their contacts with Chinese, especially their Chinese girlfriends.
Ten African diplomats prepared to leave for Nanjing Friday to meet with their students and investigate allegations some had been beaten and hit with electric prods, a charge the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied Thursday.
'We want to find out the condition of the students,' a senior Ghana diplomat at the Beijing embassy said. 'We also want to talk to authorities to make sure this does not happen again.'
In Ghana, Accra Radio, reporting on what it called the 'current molestation of African students in China,' said the government had expressed concern over the situation.
Nanjing police have arrested Alex Dosoo, of Ghana, and accused him of seriously injuring a Hehai University employee in the Dec. 24 campus fracas, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
A Nanjing police official told Xinhua that Dosoo and three other African students have 'admitted that they have broken the law.'
Alpha Robinson, of Gambia, and Dossoumou Boni Lodovic, of Benin, will be detained 15 days as punishment for their part in the incident, the agency said.A fourth student, Hanson Ebenezer, of Ghana, has been released from detention, it said.
The Jiangsu Province government said four African students at Hehai were being expelled over the incident.
The students at Hehai said nearly all its 79 foreign students were back at their dormitories but remained in their rooms out of fear and now want to leave China.
'A few people want to stay, but nearly all want to go back home,' said Amadou Mamadou, 26, an irrigation major at Hehai. 'We are still afraid to go out, afraid people will attack us.'
Authorities have barred them from leaving the city without permission, the students said.
The students had sought refuge at Nanjing railway station after thousands of angry Chinese protested in the city shouting 'kill black devils' and demanding Africans be punished for the clash at Hehai in which 11 Chinese were hurt, one seriously.
The group was taken by police to the guest house and held until Saturday, when hundreds of police forcibly removed them and sent all, except for the Hehai students, back to their campuses.
