The League was founded in the background of the political changes in the early 1970s when the Cultural Revolution and Lin Biao Incident heavily discredited the Chinese Communist Party, as well as the emergence of the social movements in Hong Kong at the same time.
Until in 1972, few of the Hong Kong youths made an expensive trip to Paris to meet with the exiled Chinese Trotskyists.
Few of the returnees such as John Shum and Ng Chung-yin left the Seventies Biweekly dominated by anarchists, and established a Trotskyist youth group called Revolutionary International League.
[1] The league published periodicals such as Combat Bulletin and aligned themselves with the International Majority Tendency of the United Secretariat.
In 1975 it became the Chinese section of the Fourth International, together with another long-existing Trotskyist group the Revolutionary Communist Party.