Chinese students are “being brainwashed by western theories” say a group of Chinese academics who are urging the country’s communist government to push more Marxism in economics courses.

“The rise of western thinking in degree courses, alongside the waning of Marxist content, has ‘severely deviated college economics education from the socialist direction,’ the professors wrote in a letter to the ministry of education,” reports the Financial Times.

The missive asks for colleges to reinstate a 50/50 mix of Marxist thought and western economics in the next academic year. One retired professor among the dozens who signed the letter told the newspaper that western economic theory was one of the reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed.

While China is officially a communist country, it started to abandon central economic planning in the 1970s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who was said to proclaim: “To get rich is glorious.” The country’s commercial activity rapidly expanded into the world’s second biggest economy behind the U.S.

“Marxist economics has shaped the world economy,” Ha-Joon Chang, an economics professor at Cambridge University, told the FT. “The architects of the east Asian economic miracles in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan were all schooled in Marxist economics, which sees industrialization as a way of generating surplus.”

China last month said its government could afford to expand its debt level from 26.66 trillion yuan ($4.1 trillion) at the end of last year in order to finance construction and economic growth.

The country’s Ministry of Finance cited concerns about the massive borrowing by local governments, which have risen to about 90 percent of their economic output, according to Bloomberg News.

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