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ABSTRACT
This article innovatively adopts the public narrative analysis to deepen the understanding of youth policy as the historically contingent product of cultural, historical, and geopolitical factors, rather than as a universal given. Drawing upon insights from Marshall Ganz’s three elements of the public narrative, namely the Story of Self, Story of Us, and Story of Now, the study theorizes the dialectic linkage between public narratives and policy. Through investigations of China’s Well-off Society China Dream narratives, followed by Europe’s Nobel Peace and New Narrative, this study carries out a comparative analysis of the latest narratives and the latest youth policies in Europe and China. Three thematic aspects are explored: the narrative positions, the fundamental attributes of the youth policies, and the relationships between the Story of Us and the Story of Self. Youth civic engagement is found to be of secondary relevance to youth technology capacity-building in China’s Youth Development Plan (2016–2025), whereas youth civic engagement plays a key role in Europe’s new EU Youth Strategy (2019–2027), in which the Story of Us serves the interests of the Story of Self.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Distinctive from yet easily confused with the Story of Self in the public narrative, each of us can author our own ‘ontological narrative’, a concept that refers to personal stories about how we understand ourselves.
2 Well-off Society narrative: 小康社会 in Chinese.
3 The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (Zhonggong Zhongyang Jilv Jiancha Weiyuan Hui) is the highest internal control institution of the Communist Party of China, tasked with enforcing internal rules and regulations and combating corruption and malfeasance in the party.
4 The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is a political body composed of the party’s top leaders. It currently has 205 full members and 171 alternate members.
5 According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.
6 Xinhua Net is the official website of Xinhua News Agency. It consists of Beijing General Network and more than
30 local channels distributed throughout China and is one of the most important Chinese new sites.
7 From Xi’s 2017 address at the opening of the Party’s 19th National Congress.
8 From Xi’s address at Beijing Normal University in 2014.
9 From Xi’s Address at the 19th Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the Great Hall of the People.
10 IMF anticipated that China will reach around 11,935 US dollars in GDP per capita in 2021, and as a rule of thumb, countries with developed economies have GDP per capita of at least $12,000 (USD), although some economists believe $25,000 (USD) is a more realistic measurement threshold (see webpage: https://www.investopedia.com/updates/top-developing-countries/).
11 The century of national humiliation runs from the First Opium War (1839–1842) through the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945.
12 It was 27 because Croatia did not join until 2013 and the UK was still a member.
13 The full ‘YOUrope for Youth’ declaration is presented as Appendix A.
14 For the definition of Non-mainstream Political Participation, please see (Li Citation2020).
15 In December 2019, the youth the unemployment rate in the European Union was 6.2 percent (Trading Economics Citation2019).
16 The term Middle-Income Trap usually refers to countries that have experienced rapid growth and thus reached the status of a middle-income country (MIC) in a considerably short amount of time but have not been able to further catch up to the group of high-income economies.
17 China Dream narrative came into existence in 2012, and New Narrative for Europe appeared in 2013.