- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 1 November 2003 11.08 GMT
Chinese students demonstrate against Japanese students who had performed a jokey sketch involving fake genitals
Camping it up in red bras and knickers bulging with paper cups, the performers must have been expecting guffaws or at least shy giggles from the freshmen and faculty they were entertaining at a welcoming party for new students.
Instead, they sparked an anti-Japanese demonstration by thousands of fellow students, internet death threats, and articles in the national media accusing them of attempting to humiliate China and its people.
The outcry sparked by the innocuous display of student humour this week is the latest and most bizarre in a series of public demonstrations against anything Japanese - one of the few issues on which the Chinese government appears ready to tolerate large-scale protests.
According to the state-run news service Xinhua, the performance at the party for foreign language students in Xian, western China, included three Japanese students and a teacher wearing brassieres and false genitals made from paper cups hanging from their waists. They danced "obscenely" and threw scraps of paper pulled from their underwear at the audience.
The audience of conservative students and professors called a stop to the high jinks. If the performers had been Chinese, Russian or European, that would probably have been the end of the matter. But the fact that they were Japanese turned a cultural misunderstanding into an international incident.
Several thousand Chinese students gathered in front of the university's foreign students' dormitory on Thursday to demand that the Japanese offenders apologise. Yesterday hundreds continued to protest, shouting anti-Japanese slogans and waving banners, according to witnesses.
After the performance was given prominent coverage in the media, internet chatrooms filled with calls for the culprits to be deported.
Anti-Japanese feeling has lingered since the second world war, when Japanese troops used Chinese civilians as sex slaves and guinea pigs for biological experiments. But its expression has undergone a change recently, with calls for financial compensation.
In recent months the fury has grown in the wake of the death of a labourer who was killed by a Japanese chemical weapon uncovered at a construction site.
Hundreds of thousands signed an online petition against a Japanese bid to build a rail link between Shanghai and Beijing; a Japanese band was pelted with bottles when it played in Beijing; and newspapers published front-page stories about a sex tour by 400 Japanese men who allegedly hired 500 Chinese prostitutes.