China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists

A group of student activists and young Maoists were seeking last month to help factory workers form a labor union in Huizhou, a city in southern China. Credit Sue-Lin Wong/Reuters

“You are the backbone of the working class!” the protesters chanted at one rally, addressing workers at an equipment factory. “We share your honor and your disgrace!”

Protests are common in China, especially by workers who have nowhere else to turn in a nation without independent unions, courts or news media. But the demonstrations in Huizhou were unusual because they were organized by students and recent graduates from some of the country’s top universities, who have generally stayed off the streets since the 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in bloodshed outside Tiananmen Square.

In the decades since that massacre, university students have generally helped advance the party’s economic and political agenda, focusing on jobs, homes and other aspects of material well-being while supporting authoritarian rule, or at least eschewing politics. As economic growth has slowed, party officials have grown more nervous about Western influences on the nation’s youth, who are more worldly and digitally connected than ever before.

But the Huizhou activists represent a threat the authorities did not expect.

Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns.

“What we are doing is entirely legal and reasonable,” said Chen Kexin, a senior at Renmin University in Beijing who took part in the protests. “We are Marxists. We praise socialism. We stand with workers. The authorities can’t target us.”

But they have. On the morning of Aug. 24, police officers wearing riot gear raided the four-bedroom apartment the activists were renting in Huizhou and detained about 50 people. As the police burst through the door, the activists held hands and sang “L’Internationale.”

Though some have been released, 14 activists and workers remain in custody or under house arrest, according to labor rights advocates. The local police accused the workers of acting on behalf of foreign nongovernmental organizations.

Since President Xi took power in 2012, the party has sought to restrict the use of Western textbooks and stop the spread of “Western values” on campus, referring to ideas about rule of law and democracy that could undermine its hold on power.

At the same time, Mr. Xi has demanded that universities expand their teachings on Mao and Marx. In May, he visited Peking University and encouraged students to promote Marxism, saying it was important for the university to “take Marxism as its surname.”

But some in the party seem uneasy about the proliferation of student groups devoted to Marxism and Maoism, apparently worried that their calls for greater economic equality and worker rights could undermine China’s modern-day embrace of capitalist markets.

While only a small minority of students are involved, they represent a leftist critique of Chinese society that seems to be gaining traction on college campuses, partly because the authorities have been more hesitant to suppress it than other political discussion.

On the Chinese internet, thousands of young people participate in vibrant Maoist and Marxist chat rooms, and some have started leftist news websites, posting commentary on topics like pollution, globalization and economic theory, without much interference by censors, until recently.

This week, school officials harassed young Marxists at a half-dozen universities and prevented some from meeting, activists said. And last year, the police in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, arrested Zhang Yunfan, the young leader of a Maoist reading group, accusing him of “gathering a crowd to disturb social order.”

Younger Chinese are often described as apathetic, selfish and obsessed with money. But Eric Fish, a writer who has studied Chinese millennials, said that the generation born after the Tiananmen Square massacre lacks the instinctive fear of authority of older generations.

“They’re more willing to go out on the street and stick their necks out,” he said. “There is not as much appreciation for what could go wrong.”

The dispute in Huizhou began in July, after Jasic Technology, a manufacturer of welding equipment, prevented its workers from forming an independent union. China allows labor organizing only under the auspices of the official, party-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

The workers said managers had seized control of their branch of the official union. Complaining of being underpaid and treated like slaves, they began to organize a petition before the police intervened and detained several of them.

The young activists learned of the workers’ plight on internet messaging apps and took up their cause, with about 40 students and recent graduates going to Huizhou, a manufacturing hub of 4.8 million people in Guangdong Province. Hundreds of others spoke out in support online — so many that several universities warned students not to go to Huizhou.

“I could not sit still,” Yue Xin, a recent graduate of Peking University who majored in foreign languages, said in an interview before she was detained. “I could not let myself be a mere internet commentator. I had to stand up.”

Zhang Shengye, 21, who graduated in June from Peking University with a degree in pharmacology, said he was inspired to join the protests by his family’s own struggles. His father, a sailor, was laid off from a state-owned firm during a wave of privatization in the 1990s, an experience Mr. Zhang described as a “financial and emotional apocalypse.”

But it was in college that he decided to answer Marx’s call to “work for mankind,” he said. Frustrated by the low wages and poor treatment of workers on campus, he and 60 other students, calling themselves the Marxist Research Association, published a report documenting labor violations.

“We share a very simple sympathy for workers and the aspiration of a better future for communism,” he said.