9 - Reaching Urban Youth

Summary

Continuing the exploration of Maoist narratives in the 1940s, this chapter considers urban youth as an audience on the eve of the 1949 Communist victory. It does this by examining publications of the Central Party Propaganda Department for the Jin Cha Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) border region, an office that would evolve into the Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) at the end of the decade. The chapter’s focus is the magazine of the regional youth association, Minzhu qingnian (Democratic Youth), and considers three types of texts that convey revolutionary messaging in different registers: the youth magazine’s biographical sketches put faces to the injustices of society; its empirical survey essays conveyed the scale of those injustices within a wider social structure; and its theoretical essays placed those injustices in a grand sweep of history. The chapter considers the role of outrage in Maoist storytelling, which it achieved by adding a moral charge to Marxist or materialist history, a charge grounded in older, more familiar and more accessible Chinese dialectics of good and evil. In this way, the magazine allows us to complete our charting of the pedigree of Maoist sociology on the eve of the 1949 revolution.