"Especially given that [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has reasserted the role of Marxism in education and official ideology, the state wants to keep a very tight grip on defining the terms of the debate," said Eli Friedman, an expert on labor in China at Cornell University.

Friedman explains the activists' union work highlighted deficiencies where the Chinese Communist Party has not upheld its own socialist commitments: "Students trying to organize with workers, while aggressively framing the struggle in Marxist political terms, poses a real threat to ideological monopoly," he says.