IN EARLY May China’s leaders pulled out all the stops to mark the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. That was no surprise. The Communist Party claims to be a champion of the German thinker’s revolutionary ideas. Xi Jinping, the party’s chief, led fellow leaders in a Marxist study session. Some 300 Marxist scholars attended a grand conference held at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions.

It may seem odd, then, that on September 21st a Marxist society run by students there announced that it was facing closure. A message posted by the club on social media said the group was having trouble finding a faculty member to supervise it (an annual rigmarole faced by student societies in China). It said the club had eventually found a backer who was not a teacher of Marxism, but the authorities had rejected this solution. The following day young Marxists at a university in Nanjing, an eastern city, said they had also been facing hassles. A Marxist society at another university in Beijing said it was struggling, too.

In recent years the party has tightened controls over journalists, lawyers and others it regards as potential troublemakers. It is now turning its attention to young campaigners who wave the same Marxist flag as the party, but who use it in defence of society’s underdogs rather than as a bludgeon against the party’s critics. Last November Zhang Yunfun, a 20-something former member of Peking University’s club, was arrested during a Marxist study session he had organised at a university in the southern city of Guangzhou. He was given a six-month jail sentence for disturbing public order.

The country’s rulers tremble at the thought of a Marxist revival. #MeToo activists have been invoking the philosophy in their efforts to expose professors who demand sex from students. Earlier this year hundreds of students from several universities expressed support for workers who had been fired for trying to set up a union in their factory in the southern city of Shenzhen. Several students, including self-styled Marxists who travelled to the city to help them, were arrested in August (some are pictured before the police raid). In its posting on social media, Peking University’s club said officials had hinted that events in Shenzhen were one reason why the society was in difficulty.

In the end supportive responses on social media to the club’s posts appeared to persuade the university to soften its stance. On September 26th the society said it had finally completed its registration, and that the head of the university’s Marxism department would be its sponsor. But the group, and others like it, will surely be kept on a short leash. The party is not only afraid of genuine Marxists, but also of Peking University’s long history at the forefront of anti-establishment movements. When Marxists first started a study group at the university a century ago, those attending included a librarian called Mao Zedong.