Chinese Youth in the 1950s: Everyday Life on the Road to Socialism

• In Event: Youth Activism, Attitudes and Ideology in Russia and China

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine the relationship between Chinese youth and the Chinese Party-state in the 1950s, through an analysis of the youth’s everyday life during the transition to Mao’s socialist China.
The 1950s was a first decade after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During this decade, the Chinese society underwent a profound transformation from “Old China” to “New Socialist China”. In this transition, millions of young people, mostly students, were mobilized to participate in major political campaigns to construct socialist new China. Thus, youth were often viewed as “Loyal Soldiers”, with enthusiasm for the call of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This paper reveals a more complex and tense relationship between youth and the Chinese Party-state. The focus is on the college students during the early 1950s. One characteristic of these students was their strong political activism. Under the influence of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, many Chinese college students began to openly criticize the one-party system, and advocate the values of socialist democracy and the liberation of thought through demonstrations. These demonstrations and criticisms showed that youth were not always committed socialist supporters.
There were around 440,000 college students in 1957. Yet, we know very little about their thoughts and behaviors. How did they adapt their everyday activities to the revolutionary ideology and pursue personal lives under the control of the Party-state? How did their thoughts and behaviors change after the foundation of PRC?
To address these questions, this paper draws attention to personal everyday-life experiences. Everyday life is a “contact zone” where the micro-world of individual daily activities interacts with the macro-world of political and socio-cultural context. This paper takes seriously the macro-history of political movements and social transformation in the 1950s, but pays more attention to the micro-history of youth’s everyday lives, because it is in everyday life that we can find out the actual thoughts, motivations and emotions of youth, and the mechanisms of political control over individuals.
The main sources of this research are unpublished personal archives, including diaries, personal letters to relatives and friends, and studying notes. Based on these personal archives, this paper aims to achieve two main purposes: first, to explore how youth adapted their everyday activities to the revolutionary ideology and pursued personal lives under the control of the Party-state; Second, to offer an in-depth analysis of the interaction between youth and politics under Mao for further comparative studies with other communist regimes.

Author

• Zheng Haolan, Keio University