Organizing Shanghai's youth: Communist, Nationalist, and collaborationist strategies, 1920--1942

Many scholars have written about student protests in twentieth-century China, but few have focused on youth organizations. This dissertation explores Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Nationalist Party (GMD), and collaborationist government efforts in Shanghai to harness the energy and political force youth had displayed during the May Fourth Movement. The Communist Youth League, the Three Principles of the People Youth Corps, and the China Youth Corps sought to recruit youth and indoctrinate them in ways that would strengthen political parties or governments. All three of these youth organizations enjoyed great successes, but none was able to survive wartime pressures in the late 1930s and 1940s.;The story begins with how central the Comintern and Communist Youth International were to the early development of the Socialist Youth League. Within five years, expansion of the Chinese communist movement allowed the Socialist Youth League to change its name to the Communist Youth League in 1925. Although the Communist Youth League was able to use popular movements to expand its membership considerably, it lost momentum during the White Terror in the face of GMD repression and infiltration. Despite the efforts of devoted members in Shanghai to recapture former glory, the Communist Party disbanded what remained of its Youth League in 1937.;The middle chapters show that although the widely reviled Three Principles of the People Youth Corps deserved its notorious reputation for counter-productive factionalism in most of China, the Shanghai branch of this organization provided invaluable service to the GMD by conducting intelligence operations, running pro-Chongqing propaganda campaigns, and infiltrating collaborationist organizations.;The final chapter depicts simple yet effective collaborationist efforts to recruit youth into the China Youth Corps. By allowing youth to shoulder responsibility for reconstruction and security, they could collaborate while working in service of their country. That their actions would eventually be considered traitorous may never have occurred to most China Youth Corps members.;The Shanghai operations of these three youth organizations challenge long-held attitudes about CCP perseverance, GMD irrelevance, and collaborationist perfidiousness, even though the youth organizations did not accomplish everything the CCP, GMD, and collaborationist regimes originally hoped.