As the sun set on June 8, 1969, a group of teenagers gathered near a massive tree in a main square of Budapest to mourn the untimely death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. By the end of the evening, sirens blared, teens were interrogated, and the myth of the most notorious juvenile gang in Budapest was born. The origin of the Great Tree Gang became an elaborately cultivated morality tale of the dangers posed by allegedly rebellious youths to the conformity of communist communities. In time, governments across Cold War Europe manufactured similar stories about the threats posed by groups of unruly adolescents. In Children of Communism, Sándor Horváth explores this youth counterculture in the Eastern Bloc, how young people there imagined the West, and why this generation proved so crucial to communist identity politics. He not only reveals how communism shaped youth culture, but also how young people shaped official policy. A fascinating read on the power of youth protest, Children of Communism shows what life was like for the first generation to have been born under communism and how one evening spent grieving rock and roll under a tree forever changed lives.

In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films, memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state repression even as Stalin’s regime offered them the opportunity to participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists, Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture as a core part of socialism.

In recent decades, much of youth research in Chinese societies has sought to understand the transformation of the younger generation and their social environment in the context of globalization, deindustrialization and economic insecurity. The epochal events of the global economic transformation and financial crisis, along with long-term Chinese social trends such as rising unemployment, income disparity, and migration, are in the process of creating new structural relations between young people and related social actors. Accordingly, this book charts the current conditions of youth services and policies in Chinese societies by examining case studies in Beijing, Jinan, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong. The chapters address the related issues stemming from unemployment, volunteering, internal migration, economic disadvantages, school social work, and leadership training. Through comparative analyses of the aforementioned issues, the collection highlights contemporary issues in Chinese youth policies and services, including work commitment, social inclusion, social support from family and teachers, volunteering, and leadership training. The book argues that the strengthening of empowerment and social inclusion in Chinese youth services offers a solution to problems of alienation, powerlessness, and underclass status. The quest for social inclusion therefore merits renewed attention in the youth policies and services of Chinese societies. This was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth.

A ground-breaking analysis of how the Malayan Communist Party helped forge a Malayan national identity, while promoting Chinese nationalism.

In 2003, President Hu Jintao instructed Communist Youth League cadres to 'keep the Party assured and the Youth satisfied'. This laconic recognition that winning the support of Chinese youth requires a more responsive engagement with their interests and demands, provided the League with a new youth work mandate to increase its capacity for responsiveness. This original investigation uses a combination of interviews, surveys and ethnography to examine the often contradictory and self-defeating ways the League implemented this mandate locally and nationally. By doing so, it also sheds light on Xi Jinping's decision to downgrade it politically and organizationally in 2016. This book introduces a previously unexplored organization and develops 'juniority' as a conceptual tool that captures the ways generational power is institutionalized and fuels youth political apathy. For this reason, apart from China scholars, this study will be of particular interest to those working on comparative youth politics and sociology.