Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese

livemint.com:

To mark China’s National Day on October 1st the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!" it proclaimed. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping.

So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and violence were deemed unfit for public airing. gai, as he is known, has turned a new leaf.

He is now the league’s mc. The Communist Party’s youth wing is a vast organisation. With 74m members it is nearly as large as the party (98m), from which it is separate although some of its members have both affiliations.

It plays a big role in China’s political life. The league indoctrinates people aged between 14 and 28 in the party’s ideology, trains potential party members and helps the party to identify talent that can be groomed for high office. It also has an outward-facing task: spreading the party’s message among young people with no political ties.

After he assumed power in 2012, Mr Xi worried that the league was not up to the job. Officials admitted that it had become out of touch with young Chinese. For the party, China’s youth are a growing problem.

The economy is stagnating, unemployment is rife among the young and housing costs are sky-high. Late last year small youth-led protests broke out in several cities. They were aimed at Mr Xi’s draconian “zero-covid" regime (subsequently abandoned).