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Abstract
The launching of the reform program in 1978 went hand in hand with praising Chinese youth as the vanguard of the new struggle for modernising China. Yet, the official rhetoric projected the ideal youth, while being at odds with the complex reality of the early post-Mao era, when the experience of the Cultural Revolution (CR) turned out to be the main reason for the so-called 'youth problem'. Both international and Chinese literature have highlighted that in the reform era, youth, intended as a social and cultural category or construct, came to be associated with less positive values, and the traditional discourse of 'youth as hope' proliferated along and intertwined with a negative discourse of 'youth as trouble'. This paper looks at the re-emergence of the Communist Youth League (CYL) as a key institutional actor in setting the stage for the construction of a new social discourse on youth in the transitional period 1978–1981, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership confronted with the need to deal with the tumultuous upheaval of the CR and its impact on youth on the one hand, and to push forward the reformist agenda on the other. By mainly relying on CYL sources (documents, internal publications and the official youth press), a part of which has been largely unexplored so far, it shows how the discourse on youth became complex and multifaceted in those historical circumstances, reflecting not just different views within the élite but also and most importantly the very tensions involved in the reform project. While the existence of the 'youth problem' led to establishing a causal nexus with the now condemned ultra-leftist tendencies associated with Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, the need to make sense of the complexity of youth boosted a heated debate on youth characteristics, with a number of cadres and adult experts affiliated to the CYL defining, describing and prescribing what Chinese youth were in ways that, by ensuring they had not been guilty as former Red Guards and recognising them as both victims and increasingly emancipated actors, eventually pushed forward a new idea of youth that conformed to the new modernization aims of the Party. Providing an assessment of the young generation and its inclinations in the aftermath of the CR eventually became the premise for facilitating the emergence of a new youth subjectivity, while envisioning the integration of the self within the broader collective and the coexistence of liberal values with traditional socialist ethics. The debate on youth characteristics reflected the complex changes taking place in China and was constitutive of a broader process that set the stage for rethinking the socialisation of youth in the post-Mao era.

An instrument of political socialization of the younger generations and a privileged access channel to the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, the Communist Youth League has partnered up with the Party in the various phases of its history, acting as a bridge between the Party and young people and carrying out important support functions for party policies. Despite having been going through a phase of decline for some years, the Youth League remains, to this day, an essential component of the Chinese political and institutional system. The economic reforms impacted on this organization which, while remaining structurally dependent on the Party, has seen an expansion of its traditional role, in order to be more attractive to its constituency, and at the same time maintain its function as a link and guide for the Chinese youth. Since the early Nineties, institutional adaptation and innovation have undoubtedly been significant. This contribution aims to provide an analysis of the functioning of the Youth League in the People's Republic of China and to outline the evolution of official youth work since the Tian'anmen crackdown, taking into consideration the main official documents. Particular attention will be paid to the adaptation process that has been initiated in order to reconcile its twofold identity as Party assistant and youth organization and strengthen the link with the new generations. This article will show that the transition of the focus of the League's work towards social services, while attempting to address newly emerged needs and problems affecting young people, has been primarily understood as a way to socialize them in the official political discourse and practices and maintain the stability of the system in a context of changing State-society relations. ; Strumento di socializzazione politica delle giovani generazioni e canale di accesso privilegiato alle fila del Partito comunista cinese, la Lega giovanile comunista ha affiancato il Partito nelle varie fasi della sua storia, fungendo da ponte tra il Partito e i giovani e svolgendo importanti funzioni di supporto alle politiche di partito. Pur attraversando da alcuni anni una fase di declino, la Lega rimane, ad oggi, una componente essenziale del sistema politico e istituzionale cinese. Le riforme economiche hanno inciso su questa organizzazione che, pur rimanendo strutturalmente dipendente dal Partito, ha visto ampliare il suo ruolo tradizionale, per essere più attraente per il suo elettorato, e allo stesso tempo mantenere la sua funzione di anello di congiunzione e guida per la gioventù cinese. Sin dai primi anni Novanta, l'adeguamento istituzionale e l'innovazione sono stati indubbiamente significativi. Questo contributo si propone di fornire un'analisi del funzionamento della Lega giovanile comunista nella Repubblica popolare cinese e di delineare l'evoluzione del lavoro giovanile ufficiale dopo la repressione di Tian'anmen, prendendo in considerazione i principali documenti ufficiali. Particolare attenzione sarà dedicata al processo di adattamento avviato per conciliare la sua duplice identità di assistente del Partito e di organizzazione giovanile e rafforzare il legame con le nuove generazioni. Questo articolo mostrerà che il passaggio del focus del lavoro della Lega verso i servizi sociali, nel tentativo di affrontare i bisogni e i problemi emersi di recente che colpiscono i giovani, è stato inteso principalmente come un modo per socializzare i giovani nel discorso e nelle pratiche politiche ufficiali e mantenere la stabilità del sistema in un contesto di mutate relazioni Stato-società.

Since the beginning of the new century Chinese leaders have attempted to increase the 'relevance' of the Communist Youth League (CYL) by calling for a more responsive organisation as a way to cultivate political loyalty at a time of profound social change. Yet, the call for more responsive patterns of work is not new. Mainly based on the Chinese youth press, official documents, and leaders' speeches, as well as memoirs and biographical material, this paper provides an organisational analysis of the CYL in the post Cultural Revolution period, focusing on the functional adjustments that were discussed when the CYL was revived nationally and the economic reforms were launched. As such, it explores early national initiatives, discourses, and debates surrounding the reform of the work of the CYL as developed through the 1980s, and highlights the influence of reform-minded political leaders in pursuing a new approach to "youth work" that, by envisaging a loosening of the Party's control over League affairs, aimed at moving away from past practices and enabling the organisation to better relate to a wide range of youth concerns. This paper sheds light on the way the policies of reform and opening up impacted upon a traditional political body that was called to increasing responsiveness to the demands coming from society, but also shows the structural paradox of an institution embedded in the Leninist political system and designed to serve as an intermediary between the Party and the country's youth. ; 21世紀以來,胡錦濤等中國領導人提倡共青團要創新並增強社會性職能,只有將共青團的政治職能向服務職能轉變,才能增強對青年的吸引力。回顧歷史會發現這其實並非新問題。通過對中國媒體資料、歷史數據和中共領導人傳記的研究,本文分析了共青團在文化大革命結束後的發展,尤其是自1978 年開始的有關共青團地位、作用和體制改革的討論和政策。在胡耀邦等人領導下,共青團在1980年代的發展反映了改革開放政策對一個傳統團體產生的影響以及共青團在新形勢下要轉型成一個代表青年的組織所面臨的挑戰。

AbstractSoon after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), youth
exchanges came to be a major part of the Chinese campaign to reach out and
influence the people of other nations. Despite the growing scholarly discussion
regarding the role of people-to-people diplomacy and external propaganda in
China's foreign policy, so far no direct attention has been paid to the
Chinese Communist Party's efforts to institutionalize youth exchanges and
use them as a tool to promote the new Chinese government's foreign
relations. This article locates the position of young people within the
PRC's people-to-people diplomacy. It attempts to explore youth exchanges
with the West in the early years of the Cold War by focusing on relations
between Italian and Chinese youth groups in the 1950s. Relying mainly on
unexplored archival material and memoirs, this article documents contacts and
exchanges between adult-led youth organizations and their members, and shows how
Italian left-wing party-affiliated youth groups and Soviet-dominated
transnational organizations provided important channels for Sino-Italian
encounters and for building long-lasting contacts among potential future leaders
of these countries.

The beginning of the twentieth century marked in China the emergence of "youth" (qingnian) as a distinct analytical category associated with national modernity. As the term qingnian assumed unprecedented significance, a new generation of educated youth aware of its role as agent of social change also came into being. In fact, the May Fourth movement turned Chinese youth into a social force that could be organized and mobilized for effective action by nascent ideologically committed political parties. The historical analysis of the Socialist/Communist Youth League, the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated youth organization, is rather biased, as official historiography tends to overemphasize its role as well as the symbiotic nature of its relationship with the Party. Moreover, so far Western scholars have carried out little work on the topic. This paper makes use of largely unexploited documentary material to reconstruct the history of the Youth League from its inception to its disbandment on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, and to show how the League interacted with the party's development in the early stage of the Communist movement. It argues that, in a political context of contestation over power, it was mainly conceived as a tool for Communist propaganda and mobilization of mass support. Yet, the League's relationship with the party was not always one of symbiosis and subordination.

In 1962, in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, an ideological dispute broke out between the Italian Communist Party (ICP) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and eventually led to the interruption of bilateral relations. Togliatti's idea of a transition to socialism through democratic and peaceful means (the so-called via italiana al socialismo) was at the core of the Chinese condemnation of the Italian Communist Party's policy as 'revisionist'. Yet, divergences clearly emerged as early as 1959 when the ICP sent for the first time a high-level delegation to China to officially meet the leaders of the CCP. The joint document signed at the end of the visit was the result of a long process of negotiation that disclosed not only the Chinese dissent towards the Italian positions on 'peaceful coexistence' and the via italiana al socialismo, but also the difficulties of reaching a consensus over the terminology to be used and translated in Chinese. This chapter will focus on the ICP-CCP dispute as seen through the analysis of language, considering as main sources the Communist official press (Italian and Chinese), Italian and Chinese leaders' speeches and also some relevant archival documents. Our aim is to provide a better and deeper understanding about the relations between politics and language in the context of this controversy, which involved two political parties (the ICP and the CCP), which were searching for their own autonomous road to socialism, albeit in very different historical contexts.