The Modern College of Northwest University not only banned its students from celebrating Christmas on Thursday, calling the Christian holiday "kitsch;" as an alternative activity, the university forced its students to watch a 3-hour propaganda movie.

The students were threatened with punishment if they didn't watch the film about Confucius, and their teachers stood guard to prevent them from escaping, reports Reuters.

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During the day, the university, which is in Xian, also hang banners throughout the campus with two propaganda messages that read: "Strive to be outstanding sons and daughters of China, oppose kitsch Western holidays" and "Resist the expansion of Western culture."

The university is also pushing its students to give more attention to the Spring Festival, a Chinese holiday, according to an official microblog entry of the school which sought comments from students.

According to the entry, more Chinese are giving importance to Western festivals because in their eyes, "the West is more developed than China, and they think that their holidays are more elegant than ours, even that Western festivals are very fashionable and China's traditional festivals are old fashioned."

Although China does not consider Christmas a holiday, young Chinese, especially those in urban areas, celebrate this Christian holiday by going out, giving presents and decorating their homes with Yuletide items such as Christmas trees and wreaths.

Besides the university, the city of Wenzhou in the province of Zhejiang, forbade all schools and kindergartens to celebrate Christmas.

Since China became a communist state, it cut ties with Vatican, although Catholic churches are still existing but have gone underground.

Even non-Catholic Christian churches are being forbidden to place Christian symbols such as the cross, which explains why Wenzhou authorities removed crosses from more than 400 churches in the city, but their reason is that the crosses violated building code rules.

The range of estimates of the number of Christians in China begins from 23 million up to 100 million, which has alarmed Beijing.

Tagschristmas, propaganda