The Chinese Communist Youth Movement, 1949–1966

Abstract

In the Cultural Revolution, the task of dismantling and reorganizing the Communist Party has not spared the various youth organizations that operated under the Party's aegis. Mao's injunction to “bombard” the bourgeois central headquarters within the Party has involved a similar bombardment of lesser headquarters in dependent establishments. Just as the Party organization was by-passed in the formation of rebel committees, so Communist youth organizations have been subsumed or swamped in the Red Guard movement. The Youth League in particular, as the Party's “main assistant,” has shared its fate.