Jiangxi College Apologizes for Making Female Students Swap Dorms With Incoming Men
Jingdezhen University in Jiangxi apologized after senior female students were relocated to free beds for a larger male freshman intake, with students describing midnight lock changes and pressure — the sharpest local instance of a national student-housing squeeze.
Students at Jingdezhen University, a public college in Jiangxi province, returned for the fall term to find the school rearranging more than their timetables: dozens of senior female students were told to vacate their dormitory so that incoming male freshmen would have beds. After days of online fury — including accounts of staff keeping watch outside rooms and doors being re-locked in the night — the university issued a statement on September 10 apologizing to students and saying staff involved had been disciplined.
Beds for the boys, corridors for the women
The school's own account, posted by Toutiao News in a statement liked more than 13,000 times, was bureaucratic almost to the point of confession: the 2026 intake had admitted more men than women, male beds had run short, so women in one building would be redistributed to two others. The relocation was already complete, the statement said. It conceded that "individual staff members used simple and crude methods," and offered "a sincere apology to students."
What students had described went beyond crude methods. Multiple senior women said in posts that after they refused to move, staff shadowed and pressed them, and that locks were changed on their doors overnight. The university's student-services center denied there had been midnight door-breaking, explaining that when holdout students finally agreed to move, they found their old rooms empty and fitted with three new locks — staff had only removed the extras. A document circulating under the university's own seal added accusations that students had been threatened through their party membership and scholarship status, and that a teacher had suggested women come to the school to choose a husband — an allegation, reported on Weibo, the university has not addressed.
A national squeeze
The backlash outgrew one campus within a day. An alumna wrote that in her years at Jingdezhen she had moved dormitories three times and switched campuses once, and was still waiting for the return of an air-conditioner deposit of about 240 yuan per person; her account was picked up by China Blue News. The Beijing News' editorial page warned schools not to let the opening term become, again, "the season when dormitory problems come to light," noting that the pattern repeats every September (ThePaper).
The shortage is real and national: China's colleges are enrolling record numbers of students while campus housing stagnates, and some universities have begun buying up private apartments to convert. Hubei University became the first in the country to purchase commercial housing next to its campus for student dormitories — a fix that made news precisely because it is so rare (Baidu). Against that backdrop, Jingdezhen's choice of who should absorb the shortfall — the women about to graduate, rather than anyone with the power to object — is what turned a logistics problem into a gender argument.