Keep in touch with China’s young people or risk your downfall, Communist Youth League warned

A senior official with the Communist Youth League has warned that the significance of the league will dwindle if it fails to keep in touch with young people, following stern criticism of its self-serving attitude and tendency of becoming “aristocratic”.

Luo Mei, a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, said that the organisation’s “value of existence” – like that of the Communist Party – depended on the needs of the people.

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“[The youth league] exists and is able to develop because the people need it, because China’s development needs it. If the ordinary people don’t need [it] anymore, it will lose the point of existing,” Luo told the South China Morning Post on the sidelines of the national political advisory body’s annual sessions in Beijing on Monday.

The Communist Youth League, once the cradle for promising young cadres and future political high-fliers, has been accused by inspectors from the party’s top disciplinary watchdog of being overly “bureaucratic, administrative, aristocratic and entertainment-oriented.”

The watchdog did not elaborate on these terms, but the accusation of the league’s “aristocratic” tendencies has prompted much speculation, especially under the context of the downfall of the league’s alumni Ling Jihua, a one-time top aide to former president Hu Jintao, and the apparent low-key profiles of other once rising league stars.

READ MORE: Party watchdog takes aim at ‘self-serving’ youth league cadres

Some observers have understood the criticism as a reference to the belief among some officials that joining the league’s central committee, or becoming part of the so-called tuanpai faction, as alumni are known, automatically opened the door to a promising political career.