Talk:La Jeunesse
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"From September 1920, New Youth became a propaganda tool of the Communist Party of China."
I find this segment of the article to be inaccurate and misleading for the following reasons:
There was no Communist Party of China in September 1920. Marxism was definitely gaining in popularity among radical Chinese intellectuals at this time, but this should not be confused with there being an actual party. While there had been some informal study groups on Marxist theory, such as those organized by Chen Duxiu, the closest thing to a Chinese Communist Party before the First Plenary held in Shanghai in July 1921 (the date most historians put as the founding of the party) was a gathering in May 1920 organized by Chen with several future members after Chen himself met with the two Comintern agents Voitinsky and Yang. It was during this earlier meeting with the Comintern agents that, according to Jonathan Spence in his The Search for Modern China (p.309), Chen was still exploring various radical political ideas besides Marxism. It was only at this point that he decided to commission a friend into creating the first complete Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto and publish it in New Youth at the end of 1920.
As implicit in my point above, there was definitely a noticeable shift in New Youth from a more general radical outlook towards one that was more overtly Marxist that coincided with Chen Duxiu's own "conversion," especially as more liberal-democratic figures such as Hu Shi quit the editiorial board. But that any issue of New Youth in 1920 paid particular attention to Marxism does not automatically signify that the magazine had become the mouthpiece of a party that did not yet exist. New Youth had many "special issues" in the past devoted to a range of other radical ideas. Two years earlier, New Youth ran a special issue devoted to Henrik Ibsen.
"Propaganda tool" suggests that the paper no longer served as a forum for critical inquiry into contemporary problems, which was not the case, at least not yet at that early date. To my knowledge, New Youth, still at that time accomodated dissenting opinions. Arguably, it became more biased as it reflected Chen's growing inclinations towards Marxism, but to say then that this makes New Youth a "propaganda tool", in my opinion, is an oversimplification.
There is a kernel of truth in the statement that I take issue with, but perhaps a more accurate sentence might be something such as:
"In 1920, after meeting with two Comintern agents operating in China, Chen Duxiu commissioned a full Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto to be published in New Youth, heralding a shift in Chen's own politics that coincides with a parallel shift in the editiorial content of the magazine; the appearance of Marxist ideas in New Youth gave rise to a growing interest in Marxism among Chinese intellectuals and made possible the founding of the Communist Party of China the following year."
