ABSTRACT
The Chinese Communist Party had been highly successful in attracting large numbers of idealistic youths, including young intellectuals, to its ranks. Not surprisingly, the party was marked by youth and vitality when it became China’s ruling party. Starting with the early 1980s, the party’s organizational weakness in the areas of youth work in general and educated youth work in particular had become impossible to ignore. According to the party’s own survey, only 1.9 percent of the roughly 1.2 million students enrolled in China’s higher educational institutions at the end of 1982 were party members. In the early 1980s, party leaders finally confronted the problem of the party’s declining appeal to educated youths and formulated policies to step up recruitment of more educated youths. Youths used to flock enthusiastically and in large numbers to the party prior to Liberation as well as in the 1950s and 1960s. During 1976–1983, the party recruited between 700,000 and 900,000 new members each year.
