China Reins In Communist Youth League, and Its Alumni’s Prospects By CHRIS BUCKLEY in The NY Times, AUG. 4, 2016

BEIJING — President Xi Jinping of China in effect wrote an epitaph to the shrunken influence of his predecessor and former rivals this week when the Communist Party announced major changes to its once-powerful Youth League, a training ground for many officials who have been marginalized under Mr. Xi.
The Communist Youth League served as a cradle for generations of Chinese leaders, who rose through it into the high ranks of the party. Mr. Xi’s predecessor as China’s top leader, Hu Jintao, was among the most prominent. Others have included Premier Li Keqiang, Vice President Li Yuanchao and Ling Jihua, the former head of the party’s general office.
But a reorganization of the Communist Youth League laid out in the state news media on Tuesday indicated that its glory days as a finishing school for China’s political elite may have passed. The overhaul promised to shrink the Youth League’s central leadership, put it under firmer party control and return it to its grass roots to try to win over the country’s young people.
“Its ranks will undergo shrinkage at the top and replenishment below,” an unnamed Youth League leader said in People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, on Wednesday, explaining the reorganization. “In the face of major changes in the social environment and youth population, there are many areas of the Youth League’s development and work that are ill-adapted or unsuitable.”
The prominence of Youth League experience in the résumés of many party officials has led some analysts to refer to a Youth League faction or clique, a coalition of cadres who came up through the organization, owed their loyalty to it and each other, and shared a political agenda that was vaguely populist.
But officials who emerged from the Youth League were never as cohesive as some assumed, and the circumstances that made the league an incubator of political talent had diminished before Mr. Xi took power in late 2012, said Li Datong, a former editor at China Youth Daily, the league’s newspaper. The latest changes made it clear that this group had little influence, he said in an interview.
“Under Hu Jintao you could maybe make a strained argument that there was some kind of Youth League faction, but not now,” Mr. Li said. “It’s ceased to exist.”
“The criticisms of the Youth League show that its influence has run its course,” he said. “It’s become a political zombie.”
The announced changes indicated that the Youth League’s alumni are unlikely to win many promotions into the topmost ranks when Mr. Xi and other leaders settle on a new national leadership lineup to be revealed late next year, said Bo Zhiyue, a professor of political science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, who studies elite Chinese politics.
“The fact that they’re conducting these serious reforms is trying to undermine the legitimacy of the Youth League as a supply pool of future leaders,” Professor Bo said by telephone. “It’s an implicit attack on the power base of the so-called Youth League faction.”
Before the changes were announced, the league had been stained by corruption and criticisms that it had fallen out of touch with the youthful idealism it was supposed to inspire.
The Youth League traces its inception to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s, to serve as a bridge to students, young workers and other potential inductees into the Communist revolution. By the end of last year, it had 87.5 million members, many of them university students who hope to eventually join the party. The maximum age is about 28 for ordinary members, although officials in the league can be much older.
The Youth League won particular prominence as an incubator for future leaders in the 1980s. That was partly because the party leader for much of that decade, Hu Yaobang, was a former Youth League leader.
Perhaps more important, the party also faced a talent gap at the time. In the late 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution and its radical supporters were swept away, party veterans such as Deng Xiaoping returned to power. But they knew that age would soon catch up with them and made plans to nurture potential successors. The Youth League became an important training ground for that, Professor Bo said.
The high tide of its prominence came under Mr. Hu, formerly the first secretary of the league, who was handpicked by Deng to be China’s top leader. Party insiders said that Mr. Hu, in turn, favored Li Keqiang, another former head of the league, to succeed him as president and party general secretary.
But instead, Mr. Xi won those posts, and Mr. Li took the more junior job of premier. Since Mr. Xi came to power, he has assumed more influence than his recent predecessors. Meanwhile, officials who spent long parts of their careers in the league have languished. Mr. Li has been less powerful than his predecessors. Li Yuanchao, the vice president, has become an ornamental figure, shadowed by anticorruption investigations that have felled former subordinates.
Most spectacularly, Mr. Ling, the former head of the party’s general office, was expelled from his posts in July last year after being charged with corruption. He appeared to have had hopes for promotion into the top echelons until March 2012, when his son fatally crashed a Ferrari Spider. Two young women were also injured, one of whom later died. Last month, Mr. Ling was convicted of taking bribes, abusing his office and illegally obtaining state secrets and was sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Hu, the former president, has remained quiet in retirement, giving no signs that he has the will or the influence to shape politics, even when his former protégés have fallen.
Months before the changes to the Youth League were announced, the party’s discipline enforcement agency issued a long, unusually scathing account of problems in the organization, including an aloof leadership. In response, league leaders promised in April to “aggressively erase ‘aristocratic’ tendencies.”
The Youth League may still help to identify and nurture future party leaders, but they will have to demonstrate more hands-on experience than previous league alumni who rose up, Professor Bo said.
“One of the criticisms of this organization has been that you spend too much time sitting in an office trying to get yourself promoted without any actual practical experience,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/world/asia/china-communist-youth-league.html?ref=asia