Reshaping of China’s Communist Youth League gives insight into party resilience

In its 100-year history the world’s largest political organisation for young people has seen its influence rise and fall

The league’s transformation shows how far the party is willing to go to unify the country’s youth and ensure its survival

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A student with the flag of China’s Communist Youth League, which celebrated its centenary on May 10, 2022. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 1:48pm, 20 May 2022Updated: 7:23pm, 20 May 2022

For decades, the Communist Youth League of China fiercely butted heads with the ruling party before gradually evolving into a key career springboard for state leaders.

Today, the century-old league stands reshaped as a modern United Front machine – trying to capture the pulse of Chinese youth with NFTs (non-fungible tokens), rap videos and even dating services.

While the transformation shows just how far the Communist Party is willing to go to unify young people and ensure its survival, analysts say the rise and fall of the youth league offers valuable insight into the party’s resilience during its tumultuous history.

At its peak in the late 2000s, the youth league – described in its constitution as the party’s assistant and reserve army – was twice the size of the world scouting movement, with around a quarter of all Chinese nationals aged between 14 and 28 as members.

A revamp in 2016 after President Xi Jinping’s rise to power saw membership fall by about one-fifth – from more than 90 million in 2012 to about 73.1 million last year, according to the latest official data.

Konstantinos Tsimonis, a lecturer in Chinese society at King’s College London’s China Institute, said the league remains a powerful organisational tool and a mechanism of political and generational control.