BEIJING — Democracy. Is it effective or flawed? Would it work in China?

Debate.

Those were the teacher’s instructions on a recent Sunday morning when 17 college students met at Tsinghua University in Beijing for “Mao Zedong Thought and the Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” a mouthful of a course that is part of a government-mandated regimen of ideological education in China.

The students were sporting dragon tattoos and irreverent shirts — one had “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” emblazoned on its back — and playing bloody shoot-’em-up video games on their phones before class.

But inside classroom 106-B, they echoed the party line.

“We’ve learned democracy just can’t last long here,” said Zhang Tingkai, a 19-year-old architecture major, describing the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution under Mao.

“It can easily turn into populism,” said Mao Quanwu, 20, a mechanical engineering student, “like what’s happening in Taiwan.”