This Week in China’s History: The Chinese Youth Party founded in Paris

December 2, 1923

Listen to my narration in the embedded player above!

In the early 1920s, seeing their country threatened by foreign imperialism and internal division, a group of patriotic Chinese — many of them students shaped by the May Fourth Movement — came together, seeking a way to unify and strengthen the country. The result was a new political party. One that promised to lead China to a new era.

I’ve used the bait-and-switch lede too often for regular readers to be surprised when I say that I am not, of course, referring to the Chinese Communist Party or its founding in Shanghai in 1921, though it fits that description. Instead, I am looking at the other side of the Eurasian landmass to Paris, where in December of 1923, the third largest Chinese political party of the 20th century was founded: the Chinese Youth Party.

The omission of the CYP from most discussions of China’s Republican era says as much about how history tends to be written as it does about either the CYP or Republican China. It’s a cliche to say that history is written by the winners; less often discussed is that those winners need an adversary about whom to write their history. Because the Nationalists and the Communists (both in sequence and in parallel) opposed one another as mutual nemeses, there became little room in the narratives of either party for a “third way.” Yet, as historian Nagatomi Hirayama writes in his book The Making and Unmaking of the Chinese Radical Right, “the orthodox revolutionary narratives focusing on the CCP and GMD did not really encompass the vast and disintegrated sociopolitical realm of Republican China.”

Figuring out what the CYP stood for and how it came to be all but written out of China’s 20th-century political history requires, well, history.