The Functions of the Chinese Communist Youth Leagues (1920–1949)

Abstract

The activities and functions of youth organisations are important factors in the life of most, if not all, political movements of the twentieth century. This is true of totalitarian, as well as of more liberally conceived political movements; however, special attention and emphasis has been given to youth organisations in Fascist and Communist societies, where the young people have been forced, pressured, or cajoled into such organisations from an early age and subjected to powerful influences designed to make them faithful and reliable tools or willing helpers of the ruling group or party. Nazi Germany's Hitler Jugend, Fascist Italy's Ballilla, and Soviet Russia's Komsomol are the best known examples of the totalitarian variety of youth organisation. In non-totalitarian societies the young are also given the opportunity to join such groups as the Young Conservatives in the U.K., Young Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., Junior Chambers of Commerce, YMCA, YWCA, Boy Scouts and the like. The difference between youth organisations in the two types of societies, from the Western viewpoint, is that our youth organisations are primarily created for the sake of the young people, who join them voluntarily for the sense of participation and outlet for their energies and talents which such organisations can provide, whereas the totalitarian youth organisations are created for purposes pursued by the ruling political group in those societies, to mould the thinking of youngsters along the desired lines, and to establish an apparatus for control both of the young members and of their relatives and friends. From the Communist viewpoint however, Western youth organisations are politically unsophisticated picnic and camping clubs, which insufficiently prepare young people for the responsibilities facing them in later years and fail to provide them with the ideals for a “correct” political outlook.