"When we do find it, we'll try to dissuade them from cohabiting, and if that doesn't work, we'll consider further penalties, including expulsion."

About 85 percent among the current 5,000 students in the college are female students who may easily become the victims of forced or coercive cohabitation, Wang said.

However, no case has surfaced thus far, according to him.

"Yet you can see the vast market for cohabitation here, and not just in a long-term sense – there are many listings for rooms available for rent for a day or even an hour all over town," Wang said.

Heated opinions

The anti-cohabitation campaign has stirred fierce debate among experts, with some believing that students' individual rights to make choices in this regard shouldn't be violated.

"These are personal choices and students shouldn't be told that one way is right and the other wrong," Li Yinhe, a social scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Peng Xiaohui, a sexuality professor at Central China Normal University, said that forcing cohabitation underground may make it all the more risky for female students.

"It's good to discourage it and help girls make informed decisions when it comes to sex, but I don't think they should be taking it to the level of enforcement," he said.

Governmental guidance on the matter has been mixed. In 2004, the Ministry of Education (MOE) issued a notice encouraging schools to forbid students from renting apartments outside their campuses. That year, the Guangzhou-based Information Times reported that most students living off-campus in Guangzhou returned to their dorms.

In an apparent about-face, however, the MOE issued a notice a year later telling schools that they can't outright forbid students from forming into partnerships or getting married.

A survey from 2007 polling more than 80,000 college students showed that 70 percent of students are tolerant of cohabitation and that about 14.4 percent of students have had sex, the Nanjing Morning Post reported last April.