In foreigners’ eyes: What galvanizes young people in a changing China

Across the world, the strength of a governing party is often measured through numbers: approval ratings, economic indicators, or public surveys.

In China, another indicator is remarkable: the number of Party members growing each year.

Between 2020 and 2024, official figures show a gradual increase in membership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), with more than 80% of new members under the age of 35.

This raises a question: how does the CPC continue to attract the younger generation in today’s rapidly changing society?

One way to explore this is not through abstract policies, but through lived experiences of foreign friends who came to China and witnessed its transformation on the ground in different periods.

Edgar Snow was the first international journalist to travel to the Communist Party of China’s revolutionary base areas in northern Shaanxi in 1936. A year later, he published Red Star over China, one of the earliest first-hand Western accounts of the Chinese revolution.

Seeking to understand what the CPC was at a time when it was still little known or often mischaracterised as a gang of outlaws, Snow’s book reached a wide international readership and sold more than 100,000 copies in Britain after its publication.

By then, the Red Army had just completed its famous Long March, a two-year retreat across some of the most difficult terrain in China’s interior to escape encirclement campaigns by Kuomintang forces.

Along the way, more than half of the soldiers died from battles, hunger, and extreme conditions, as they crossed snow-covered mountains, swollen rivers, and vast stretches of rugged land with limited supplies.

Yet the movement continued to draw the faithful support of many who were often willing to lose their lives, even as the Red Army was poorly equipped and heavily outnumbered.

Snow’s arrival in the revolutionary base was welcomed by the party’s top leaders, who saw an opportunity to present their perspective to the outside world. He was given access and support by Zhou Enlai, later the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, who encouraged him to report openly on what he saw.

During his four-month visit, the journalist interviewed senior leaders of the CPC and villagers. He also visited military camps, schools, and local factories, recording his observations and conversations in his book.

Back then, China was still a predominantly rural society, where the vast majority of the population were peasants. To understand why many of them supported the Red Army, Snow often chatted informally with the locals, both young and old. Farmers were talkative and curious about farming practices in his country, and some even asked whether goat dung was used as fertiliser.

As he spent more time among them, Snow began asking his central question: why did they support this movement?

Many villagers started talking at once, recalling years of hunger and hardship before its arrival. They spoke of heavy taxes and land rents that once forced families to sell livestock, crops, and in some cases even their daughters.

In contrast, they described how the army helped ease burdens, taught them how to read and write, and worked to ensure people had enough food for daily needs in local communities.

From years on the brink of survival to more stable living conditions, some villagers referred to it as “poor people’s army, fight for the people’s rights,” a phrase recorded in Edgar Snow’s book. The depiction reflected the close bond between soldiers and civilians.

The sense of affection evolved into strong unity, as many farmers and even teenagers joined the ranks to defend their own rights. In his conversations with Communist commanders, Snow observed a sense of discipline and cohesion among the soldiers, and a high level of commitment to collective goals during the revolutionary campaigns.

In his account of the crossing of the Dadu River, one of the most dangerous and fast-flowing rivers in China, Snow described a situation in which the Red Army could not afford failure, as defeat would likely have meant destruction.

The commanders understood the importance of rapid mobility, drawing lessons from earlier historical failures at similar crossings of the Dadu River. They also managed to build cooperation with local ethnic communities along the route, transforming potential hostility into alliance. Alongside these decisions, small groups of soldiers voluntarily carried out high-risk operations at critical points, often under heavy fire, to secure passage for the larger force.

In Snow’s portrayal, it was this combination of effective military judgement and battlefield discipline that enabled the Red Army to succeed in what was widely regarded as an almost impossible crossing.

Snow’s observations also pointed to another dimension of the movement: the role of the young people. On his arrival in the base area, some of the first people he encountered were young couriers who brought him meals. He soon noticed that teenagers played an active role in daily operations, serving as messengers, scouts, orderlies, and nurses, many of whom would later become full members of the Red Army. He described them as “cheerful, energetic, and loyal—the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth.”

Taken together, Snow’s account offered a rare outsider’s view into a movement still little understood at the time. From villagers describing their reasons for joining, to young volunteers who devoted themselves to the rank and file, and commanders making rapid decisions under extreme wartime pressure, he observed a society shaped by hardship yet bound by organisation and shared purpose.

If Snow tried to understand a movement through the people he met in villages, Hansen Nico René found himself decades later observing a different kind of transformation from the inside.

In 2018, Hansen, a retired police officer from Luxembourg, arrived in Zhadong Village in Guangxi almost by chance. He had come to admire the region’s dramatic landscape, towering green mountains, mist drifting through valleys, and forests that seemed to fold into the clouds.

What he did not expect was that he would stay for eight years.

A notice calling for volunteers to help cultivate passion fruit, an effort tied to poverty alleviation, first drew his attention. Curious, he followed the path deeper into the village and soon met Xie Wanju, the village’s first Party secretary.

From their first meeting, Hansen noticed something that would stay with him: Xie was not a man who merely managed a village, but someone who worked in it, lived in it, and faced its challenges as his own.

Hansen said that sense of dedication made him realise how deeply a village could be transformed when its leadership was fully invested in its people.

Hansen still remembers one moment vividly. A transport vehicle carrying fertiliser became stuck on a narrow mountain road. With no machinery available, Xie rushed to the scene and joined more than a dozen villagers in tying ropes to the vehicle and pulling it forward by hand.

They looped the ropes over their shoulders and leaned into the weight, inching the vehicle forward step by step. With each effort, veins stood out on their foreheads as they shouted in unison, “One, two, three.”

It was exhausting work. Yet when the vehicle finally broke free, the group broke into broad smiles.

Hansen says Xie Wanju is devoted to improving the living standards of the area. But in Zhadong, improving livelihoods was never simply a policy goal, but a response to the constraints of the land itself.

For Zhadong, life had long been constrained by geography. Nestled among steep mountains with limited arable land and difficult access to outside markets, the village had once struggled with widespread poverty, with more than half of its residents living below the poverty line.

Out of necessity, local leaders had been searching for industries that could take root in such terrain, and passion fruit became one of the key experiments.

Hansen joined Xie in the fields almost immediately. Together with villagers, they loosened soil, planted seedlings, and built trellises under the oppressive summer heat. Many young people had already left for cities, so much of the labour fell on those who remained, working side by side with volunteers like Hansen.

The first harvest of passion fruit brought hope. The fruit grew well, and incomes began to rise. Encouraged, more villagers expanded cultivation. But agriculture rarely follows a straight path.

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Pests soon spread through the fields, damaging leaves and threatening the harvest. An agricultural expert was called in, advising that preventive measures should have been taken earlier in the growth cycle. Now, it was a race against time.

Under pressure, Xie grew visibly concerned, not for himself, Hansen observed, but for the villagers whose hopes rested on the crop.

Without hesitation, Xie and Hansen worked alongside the expert to adjust the response: strengthening the plants with fertilisers, trimming affected branches, and reinforcing care routines to salvage what they could.

When harvest season returned, to help the fruit reach markets further afield, together with leaders from neighbouring villages, Xie helped establish online sales channels and live-streaming promotions to connect rural produce.

Beyond passion fruit, Xie and his team moved constantly between households, checking livestock conditions, helping build pig pens, treating sick animals with veterinary support, and studying market demand for local black pigs to ensure better sales. Each task, whether large or small, was approached with the same commitment: to make rural livelihoods more stable and sustainable.

Over time, the results became visible. In November 2020, Zhadong Village was officially lifted out of poverty. For many residents, it marked not an endpoint, but a turning point.

After that, Xie Wanju started working in another village called Lianhua in Guangxi, and Hansen chose to follow, continuing to support rural development efforts alongside him.

For Hansen, the years in Guangxi reshaped his understanding of what development can look like at the village level. What impressed him most was not a single project or harvest, but the example of a local leader who worked shoulder to shoulder with villagers, persisting through uncertainty, treating every setback as something to be solved together, and placing the village’s future at the centre of every decision.

They were different times and different settings – Snow’s journeys in the wartime base areas and Hansen’s years in a rural village in Guangxi – and yet a similar pattern emerges: people who come into close contact with China often encounter its society through everyday lives shaped by resilience, cooperation, and change.

Seen through these individual experiences, the question raised at the beginning returns in a quieter form, not as a statistic or a slogan, but in the ordinary moments where change is felt rather than explained.