Yet advocacy for the use of “comrade” continues to resurface in Party publications. “The salutation of comrade hasn’t been that popular for many years” one netizen remarked and added: “If uttered thoughtlessly, one may blunder and be treated with disdain, or even gets a scolding.” 8 At the beginning of the Hu Jintao era, for instance, People’s Daily reprinted an article from a Jiangsu Party journal citing an anonymous cadre’s opinion: “In present-day official circles, beat me to death, I would still not dare to address any leader as ‘comrade.’” The article then asks the rhetorical-but pertinent-question, “Who, when meeting leaders in positions of power on whom one’s future career depends, dares call them ‘comrade’?” 7 On Chinese microblogging sites, netizen reactions to Party propaganda also display a deep sense of wariness. “Comrade” continues to be an officially sanctioned form of address, though some Party officials are unhappy with the policy. 6 Yet while this is true for Chinese society at large, questions regarding its use within the Party (i.e., among more than 80 million Party members) have not been studied. 5Įchoing Gold’s conclusion, Chinese linguists have pointed out that the general use of “comrade” as a term of address “progressively withdrew from the stage of history” over the course of the post-Mao period. 4 Both traditional Confucian and market-driven values, Gold argued, quickly overwhelmed the social imperatives springing from the “universalistic morality” of political comradeship that Vogel had described in 1965. As stated by Tom Gold in a pivotal 1985 article on personal relations in the 1980s, comradeship had vanished as a central ethic holding the fabric of Chinese society together. Yet this “ethic of comradeship” 3 among citizens disintegrated by the early 1980s. Having thus become a rather commonplace address, it became difficult to differentiate between its uses in a wide (societal) or narrow (Party) sense. 2 As a result, “comrade” became a common form of address, signifying membership in two different in-groups: the CCP and the Chinese public in which Party members are naturally embedded. As Ezra Vogel put it, the term “comrade” turned into a moniker describing “the relationship of one person to another in their role as fellow citizens.” 1 Comrade also clearly “denoted a revolutionary tone” under Mao’s leadership. The revolutionary triumph of the Party made affiliation with the Communist cause generally desirable for all Chinese people on the mainland. To this day, state media continue to use this term when referring to individual Party leaders. In a narrow sense, the term has since referred to official members of the Party. As the Communist Party’s revolutionary struggle progressed toward victory, “comrade” came to be more closely associated with the Communist cause. It has been employed to foster shared identities in various contexts ranging from the revolutionary anti-Qing rhetoric of Sun Yatsen or within the wary alliance in the 1920s of Communists and Nationalists (Kuomintang). The Chinese term for “comrade,” tongzhi 同志, originated as a word compound literally meaning “common aspiration.” Just as in English, the notion connotes an attitude of joint struggle.
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