The Relationship between the CCYL and the CCP, 1920-2012: From Organizational Rival to Leadership Incubator

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the relationship between the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from their emergence in 1920 to the latest leadership change of the CCP in 2012. In contrast to existing studies that regard the CCYL either as a corporatist institution undertaking the political socialization of Chinese youths or as the foundation of a CCYL faction that plays a significant role within China’s leadership politics, this thesis highlights the multi-faceted and evolving relationship between the CCYL and the CCP in the development of the Chinese Communist movement. This thesis argues that despite its continued complexity the relationship between the CCYL and the CCP across nearly a century can nevertheless be characterized in broad terms as a change from “organizational rival” to “leadership incubator”. In the early period of the Communist movement, the CCYL functioned as a de facto second communist party which at times threatened to overtake the CCP as the major Communist organization in China. After the reconstruction under Mao Zedong in 1936, it was subordinated to the CCP’s needs and started to serve as a Party-led mass organization to politically socialize Chinese youths. And in the Deng Xiaoping and Post-Deng periods, it has played an important role as one of the institutional arrangements for developing leadership candidates for the CCP. By tracing the organizational development of the CCYL to uncover its evolving and complicated relationship with the CCP, this project provides a more complete picture of the pathway through which the contemporary relationship has emerged. On a broader level, therefore, it offers the CCYL as an example to reveal the limitations of the Factionalist and Corporatist approaches to understand China’s contemporary leadership politics. In addition, it provides new understandings and materials for the future study of the CCP’s leadership development.