Revamp stresses grass-roots recruits, cutting bureaucracy
Branches of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) across the country have begun to study a new reform plan, indicating that the powerful organization - which is in charge of ideological cultivation of the country's youth - is about to undergo a huge revamp.
The CYLC provides one of the main paths to political career in China, having groomed some of the country's top officials, including former president Hu Jintao and current Premier Li Keqiang.
Experts said that the timely reform is necessary to combat the organization's bureaucracy and stiff work mode.
On July 1, CYLC officials in Yuquan district, Hohhot, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region held a seminar to study the CYLC's reform plan, the Xinhua News Agency reported. League officials in the region's Togtoh county also held a similar seminar on July 4, detailing nine measures outlined in the plan, a local government website said.
Although the specific contents of the reform plan have yet to be published, the plan's introduction demonstrates that the government has officially begun the group's reform.
During a CYLC Central Committee meeting on April 18 to discuss implement the reform plan, CYLC Central Committee First Secretary Qin Yizhi said that the CYLC's biggest problem is that it is not close to its members and is too institutionalized, bureaucratic, aristocratic and entertainment-oriented, China Youth Daily reported. Moreover, CYLC members are not active enough, Qin asserted.
"The CYLC's work mode is out of date, and it is too passive and rigid to attract young people nowadays," Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of Peking University's anti-corruption research center, told the Global Times.
"Young people's recognition of the CYLC has decreased in recent years," said Zhuang, adding that "the CYLC has not taken the job of attracting new people as a serious issue."
"The Youth League Committees in our schools are mainly responsible for developing League members, but this is simply a decoration. Some schools don't even have a Youth League Committee," an elementary school teacher in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality told the Global Times on Monday.
Qin pointed out that as a part of the reform, the CYLC will elect more people from the grass roots as leaders and will include more part-time officials in the organization.
According to a Friday report by Southern Weekly, the CYLC Committee of Shanghai - one of two pilot reform cities named at the end of 2015 - increased the number of its members at lower levels, recruited more local residents and college students and reduced the proportion of full-time members from 76.9 percent to 57.9 percent.
China had about 87.46 million CYLC members at the end of 2015, according to Xinhua.
