BEIJING: Chinese police detained a well-known Marxist student activist at a top university on Wednesday, a witness said, for attempting to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of Mao Zedong, whose legacy in China remains controversial.

A student eyewitness told AFP that Qiu Zhanxuan, the head of Peking University’s Marxist society, was forced into a black car by seven or eight plain-clothes officers near the subway station outside the university’s east gate.

Qiu was “screaming and resisting arrest”, the student said, declining to be named due to the sensitive nature of the issue. The eyewitness said police showed their “public security department documents”, when questioned by onlookers.

“I believe it’s ridiculous. Is there anything wrong with commemorating Mao?” the eyewitness, also a member of the campus Marxist society, said.

The Communist party in recent years has tried to distance itself from the legacy of Mao. Once hailed as China’s “great helmsman”, there were no official events to mark his 125th birth anniversary on Wednesday.

Despite Qiu’s arrest, Marxist students from across Beijing gathered at an undisclosed location to organise a “flash-mob style event” on Wednesday afternoon, said a labour rights NGO worker in close contact with Marxist student groups.

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2018