CHINA’S leadership has issued guidelines advising universities to strengthen their ideological work in classrooms.

The State Council document told professors that they should champion Marxism, traditional culture and socialist core values.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that the guidelines issued on Monday by top officials within the Communist Party and the government’s powerful State Council required that ideological work should be treated as central and strategic in the country’s education system. 

It also reported that universities had been told they should approve and supervise all student associations.

Last month, Xinhua quoted President Xi Jinping as calling on the Communist Party to enhance its ideological work in universities. 

In November, a party-run newspaper in north-eastern China reported that it had sent journalists to monitor college classrooms across China and had found professors who criticised both founding father Mao Zedong and the party.

But politics professor at Beijing’s Renmin University Zhang Ming insisted that he and his colleagues had not yet felt any pressure to change their working methods or patterns.

“We don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, so we don’t think there’ll be any need to make big changes,” said Prof Zhang.

The recent focus on continuing intensified work reflects the thinking of a document leaked last year that outlined the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s top perceived threats. 

Known as Document Nine, it warned of “Western anti-China forces” and unhealthy criticism that “appears in public lectures, seminars, university classrooms, class discussion forums, civilian study groups and individual publications.”