Addressing Communist Youth League (CYL) cadres in 2003, Chinese President Hu Jintao called them to “work hard to keep the party assured and the youth satisfied”. In addition to indoctrinating, mobilizing, preparing young people for party membership and offering a career avenue for aspiring cadres, the former Chinese leader instructed the League to engage and respond to the needs and demands of its youth constituency as a means of cultivating support for the communist regime.

This presentation will examine the efforts of the CYL to expand and professionalize its youth work during the Hu Jintao decade (2002-2012) that was characterized by the Chinese government’s emphasis on social policy. It will concentrate on the structural forms of Chinese youth’s subordination and the repercussions for League cadres’ efforts to increase responsiveness. The case of the CYL’s abortive adaptation offers a new perspective into youth politics in China and also showcases the ways generational subordination is institutionalized in government and policy, thereby opening avenues for comparison with communist and non-communist youth organizations elsewhere.

 

Bio:

Konstantinos Tsimonis is a lecturer in Chinese Society at the Lau China Institute, King's College London. His research interests concentrate on Communist Party institutions and organizations, and their experiences with adapting their mode of operation to serve old purposes and new goals in China’s rapidly changing socioeconomic context since Deng’s reforms. Under this broad theme, he has studied the evolution of the Chinese regime’s youth, feminist and labor organizations, and anticorruption institutions. He is currently working on a BA/Leverhulme funded project on Chinese State Owned Enterprises in Southeast Europe and their impact on labor standards in the region.

This is the latest in the Centre for Public Policy Research's lunchtime seminar series.