The first official telephone call between Olaf Scholz and Xi Jinping is set for today. None other than former ambassador Shi Mingde has been instructed by the Chinese to assess the mood in Germany toward China in advance. Naturally, something like this can’t be done via video call and Zoom meeting. So Shi had to pack his bags, fly to Germany and spend more than a week touring the country in November to talk to old acquaintances from politics and business.
Whether Shi’s tour has achieved anything remains to be seen. Newly elected German Chancellor Scholz presented his new China policy of “fair” and “critical” treatment. We’ll keep you updated in the coming days if there’s any news on the new government’s relations with China.
On Sunday, Hong Kong’s citizens will elect a new parliament. Marcel Grzanna spoke with former parliamentarian Ted Hui and analyzed how the election preparations are going. Hui assumes that Hong Kong citizens will not participate in the election. They simply do not feel represented by the “patriotic” representatives standing for election. Meanwhile, Hui and other democracy activists from abroad have called from exile around the world to not take part in the election.
The latest part of the Global China Conversations series discussed the global supply chain situation. The world of supply chains will not be the same after the pandemic, analyzes Finn Mayer-Kuckuk. If presents are missing under the Christmas tree, this is not only due to Covid. Politics is partly to blame. Unfortunately, the talk at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy also features a rather pessimistic forecast for 2022.
“Hello, comrade!” That’s how proper socialists in China greeted each other for a long time. Then the term was hijacked by homosexuals. Ever since Xi Jinping took office, he wanted to clean up the language, hoping to bring socialism back into line by rehabilitating the term “comrade”. After all, in the Confucian sense, language shapes reality, as our author Johnny Erling writes in today’s column.
Have a wonderful fourth advent.
Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam called the announcement that public transport will be free for all citizens next Sunday a “gesture of collective responsibility”. The idea is to get people to vote, Lam said. This incentive is unlikely to be of much significance, as most polling stations are close to where voters live. But it is a sign that there is concern about low voter turnout.
But it is also a paradox. Not long after the People’s Republic of China has seized de facto control of the parliamentary elections in Hong Kong, 10,000 police officers are apparently needed to protect the ballot. Past elections – back when the elections of political representatives were a lot more independent – were always peaceful, even without police presence.
Yet the National People’s Congress in Beijing imposed its drastic electoral law reform on the special administrative zone in March specifically to bring peace to the city. The authorities now seem to be playing it safe to keep the peace when a new parliament is elected under new conditions by the city’s 4.5 million eligible voters on Sunday (December 19).
Democracy activists such as Glacier Wong, who is currently living in Germany, Nathan Law, who is in exile in London, government opponent Sunny Cheung and former student leader Alex Chow, who are both in the US, have called for an election boycott these days. Just on Wednesday, four people were arrested in Hong Kong for inciting others not to vote in Sunday’s Legislative Council election or casting blank ballots. They allegedly had violated election regulations. Since the beginning of the year, Beijing has outlawed “inciting other people to cast a blank or invalid vote.”
For former Hong Kong MP Ted Hui, this does not come as a surprise: “I think the regime is very afraid of the result and is threatening people because of it.” Another arrest warrant has been put out for Hui, who lives in exile in Australia. According to him, polling institutes have also been cautioned not to cross the “red line”.
Many of his political comrades-in-arms of the pro-democracy wing have not managed to flee. Several of them are now in custody awaiting trial. They are accused of secession or undermining state power based on the security law. The new legal framework has opened up the ability for the authorities to define any form of political opposition as a criminal offense.
Many of the once-influential opposition figures have also been placed behind bars for almost a year now. The wave of trials against politicians and activists was postponed in summer until further notice. Former parliamentarian Hui sees this as a strategy by the Hong Kong government. Of the pro-democracy forces, no one could become active in the run-up to this year’s elections.
All the more campaigning is being done by the opposition, that is, the wing that favors the premature authoritarian seizure of the city by the People’s Republic of China. In a coordinated campaign, the public sector unions called on their fellow citizens to vote “only for patriots”. Beijing’s directive is that future Hong Kong should be governed and administered only by these patriots.
Naturally, this includes all civil servants and employees of the public service. Those who do not want to lose their jobs should do their best to give the impression that they are patriots who fully support Beijing’s line. To this end, the city even introduced a new law that requires public officials to take an oath to act patriotically – and thus in the spirit of the Communist Party.
But these calls seem downright grotesque and serve more as an attempt to give the elections a democratic veneer. The electoral system in any case leaves few openings for possible democratic forces. Their influence on the legislature will be very small.
Voters can now only shape who will hold 20 of the total 90 seats with their vote. The majority of the seats, 70 in total, are instead allocated by a committee that is close to the Beijing leadership. In the last election, 50 percent of the seats were still voted on by the people. All candidates also had to pass a suitability assessment. Anyone suspected of not being patriotic enough was stripped of his or her right to participate in politics.
The Chinese leadership in Beijing is thus ensuring that its influence in Hong Kong will become even greater. It is true that in the 1980s it signed a treaty with the then British colonial rulers that the city would retain democratic freedoms for 50 years after the handover to the People’s Republic in 1997. But just a few years after the handover, it became clear that Beijing was pursuing other plans and interpreting the treaty with the British at best as rough guidelines at best.
Because Hong Kong citizens also quickly realized that the rights promised to them would disappear faster than promised, the first protests against Beijing’s growing influence began at the beginning of the millennium. Resistance finally broke out in 2019 with a mass movement that brought several million people to the streets. Hong Kong’s government, with Beijing’s support and full force, struck back at the protesters. A year after the protest movement began, Beijing established new facts with the introduction of the Security Law.
“The democracy movement in Hong Kong has effectively ceased to exist,” notes ex-parliamentarian Hui. This is why the opposition’s resistance has been coordinated from outside the country for quite some time. Hui is now watching from afar, as elections are held next Sunday. 620 voting centers will be available. 38,000 administrative officials will oversee the election process. And the 10,000 police officers will ensure that there are no incidents that could cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Collaboration: Ning Wang
What was perceived as “supply chain disruptions” at the beginning of the pandemic is now a permanent state. Goods arrive late or are not available at all for weeks and months. The economy is short of parts, causing intermediate and final products to be unfinished, which in turn are missing elsewhere.
The sputtering supply chains are one of the reasons for rising prices worldwide. This makes them a key driver of inflation around the world. Now, just before Christmas, this phenomenon also plays another role. Popular presents are harder to come by than in normal years. This applies to video game consoles as well as fashion. Aldi customers have to wait for special offer products. In the USA, even Ikea is running out of furniture. Miele is cutting back the production of washing machines. The car industry is suffering huge losses due to production halts.
However, many of these problems are not only caused by the pandemic, but also by the behavior of politicians. This was one conclusion of the discussion event “Transforming Global Industrial Chains: Opportunities for China” by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. It was held as part of the Global China Conversations series. “Trade conflicts between China and the US have exacerbated the situation,” said Xu Qiyuan, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Even after the pandemic, the world of supply chains will not be the same.
The momentum towards more difficult trading conditions is also owed to the fact that all major trading blocs are trying to make their supply channels more robust. At first, this does not result in better supply – on the contrary. “The players in the global economy are erecting barriers, separating markets, and seeking greater control,” says Rolf Langhammer, professor emeritus at IfW Kiel.
Instead of working together to reduce vulnerability to disruption, the major economies are creating new uncertainties. At best, they are uncoordinated in their strive for the same goals. In many cases, they are even working against each other. Researchers point out that since 2017, the number of trade restrictions has risen steeply. Most of them were directed against China in one form or another.
China never had any interest in upending global trade in the process, CASS researcher Xu points out. “It was not and is not aiming to break away from the global economy.” In fact, the Chinese economy remains tightly integrated, as his data show. Direct investment also continues to flow in significant amounts. Investment in China also continues to be very rewarding for international players.
According to Xu, China’s own supply of vendor parts is particularly stable, on the one hand, because the country has a large vertical real net output ratio. On the other hand, China is at least as susceptible to disruptions as all other globalized economies. Since a lot of end manufacturing takes place in China, it is dependent on smooth imports of primary products. Sudden disruptions in trade are therefore mostly detrimental to China as well.
Economist Langhammer expects that supply chains will not necessarily become shorter in the future. Instead, they will be more regionally focused. Primary products will then tend to come from the same economic area. So instead of true robustness, there will be renationalization at higher costs. This is the consequence of several political regulations. One important motive here is the growing geopolitical rivalry with China. The reaction to this is a rapprochement between the US and the EU at China’s expense.
Earlier this week, G7 finance ministers also vowed to tackle supply chain problems in the future wherever possible. A possible collapse of supply structures is to be predicted and avoided in the future, said British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak. But the goal here was also to increase “resilience,” that is, resistance to disruptions. But that is precisely the effort that, according to Langhammer, increases discrimination in trade when everyone is doing it at the same time. So such promises do not necessarily indicate a reduction in protectionist tendencies.
Another political project with a significant impact on supply relationships is the requirement to comply with social and environmental standards. This is what the various supply chain laws intend. Germany and France already introduced such laws. However, the EU now wants to follow up with a stricter set of rules. While the motives behind this are noble, it adds to tensions with China. And it’s another trade hurdle that impedes the flow of goods.
Overall, the researchers at CASS and IfW are not very optimistic for the near future that the economic blocs will return to a universal policy of open markets. “We can only hope that the development will not be as negative as we predict in our scenarios,” says Wan-Hsin Liu from IfW Kiel.
China’s communists should be proud of their proletarian form of address, “comrade” (同志 tongzhi), even after 100 years. This is what their leadership wants. In 1921, they wrote into the founding decree, “Whoever wishes to join the Party, loyally accepts its program and policies, and is recommended by another member, regardless of sex or nationality, is our comrade.” Since the reforms began, however, the varnish has peeled off the word comrade. Local party bigwigs preferred to be called “boss.” What’s even worse, after the sexual emancipation in society, the LGBTQ movement hijacked the obsolete term. In scene slang, comrade became a form of address between lovers of the same sex. In 2016, the CP reclaimed its word. Since then, “within the Party, everyone must call themselves comrades again, without exceptions.”
Only the army always held the address “comrades” in high regard. Deng Xiaoping saw to that after the Cultural Revolution. As commander-in-chief, he had the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic celebrated with a military parade. For this purpose, the armed forces marching on October 1, 1984, had practiced a new salute. Deng drove past them in a red-flag limousine with the top down, shouting: “Comrades – I salute you!” (同志们好!) and “Comrades – You take great hardship!” (同志们辛苦了!). The soldiers shouted back, “Leader: we salute you!” and “we serve the people!”
The army has retained this parade ritual ever since, even under all of Deng’s subsequent successors up to the current Party and military leader, Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, the word comrade has once again become an integral part of Party jargon. In the communiqué just released after a three-day CCP economic conference, the closing paragraph features the word total of five times in a row. Xi calls on all “comrades of the whole Party” (全党同志), “leading comrades” (领导同志) and “responsible comrades” (负责同志) to fulfill the tasks for 2022.
Comrade is back in vogue. The two characters of the word mean “common will”. The Party had derived its loanword, as the Cihai Grand Dictionary explains, from a more than 2,000-year-old motto that “If we are of one mind, we are of one heart, and if we are of one mind, we are comrades.” (同德则同心，同心则同志). So it says in the historical annals of the Guoyu Jinyusi (国语-晋语四). At first, only Party members were allowed to call themselves comrades. After 1949, according to Cihai, it became a “general public form of address.”
This went well until, thanks to Beijing’s reform policy, the citizens got fed up with the egalitarian term. It no longer fit the “civilized society” they were striving for, nor the Confucian politeness they hoped for in social interactions. In 2010, the “service standards” of Beijing’s public transport companies reflected the new thinking. According to them, bus passengers should be addressed as “sir,” “lady,” or neutrally as “passenger” (乘客). Young people and children would be entitled to be called “little friends or classmates”. Only pensioners would be allowed to be called comrades – but only if there was no other way. Smugly, the Beijing morning paper Chenbao wrote: All elders should be addressed as either “Old Master or Old Teacher” and “only then Old Comrade.” (老师傅”、”老先生”，然后才是” 老同志). The Global Times at the time ran the headline, “Don’t call passengers ‘comrade’.”
It was even worse for orthodox communists: many CP members forbade themselves to be called comrade. They wanted to be addressed by their name and title. Local CP secretaries allowed themselves to be flattered by their subordinates as “Big Boss” (大老板) or “Boss Number 1” (老大).
The Marxists revolted, and even more so when the party’s most important term of solidarity was turned into a buzzword in everyday life. China’s gay and lesbian scene adopted the term from the gay community in Taiwan and Hong Kong as code words for their same-sex relationships. They did so openly. Since 1997, homosexuality was no longer a punishable offense in the People’s Republic, and from 2001 it was freed from the stigma of being a “mental disorder.” In 2008, filmmaker Cui Zi’en (崔子恩) directed an award-winning documentary “Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China” (誌同志) about sexual emancipation among “comrades” in the People’s Republic. It is still available on Youku in China. The movement’s confidence became apparent when its activists protested loudly in 2012 because China’s newly published “Modern Chinese Dictionary” did not dare to explain the second meaning of the word comrade.
This lasted till 2014, before the CCP, under Party leader Xi, stepped up to reclaim and rebuild the ideological positions destroyed by “cultural nihilism”. Party leaders in Guangdong and Ningbo were the first to ban their members from calling themselves and their superiors “buddy,” “chief” or “boss.” Xi eventually ordered that “within the party, everyone must once again address each other as comrades without exception” (党内一律称同志), as news portal CPC revealed in late 2016.
The hope that the rehabilitation and revitalization of the term comrade could turn things around and “set things right” is based on Confucian thought. Confucius had once answered his disciple Zilu’s (子路) question about what to do first when governing and establishing dominion over a state: “What is necessary is to rectify names (必也正名乎). If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success […] Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately (名不正，則 言不順；言不順，則事不成；事不成…。君子于其 言，無所茍而已矣).”
Following this wisdom, Xi is cleaning house ideologically. First within the Party. All of its members are to line up so that he can once again address them as “comrades,” just like the army at the big military parades.
Bing Dwen Dwen is the name of one of the two mascots of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The giant snowsuit-wearing panda was designed by Cao Xue, a chief designer at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The fact that he is now waving to passers-by on the Wangfujing shopping mile in Beijing shows the message the CP wants to convey to the people in the country: the Games will take place! Recently, more and more foreign countries had signaled a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games in Beijing due to human rights violations against the Muslim minority of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. No amount of panda diplomacy will help there.
The first official telephone call between Olaf Scholz and Xi Jinping is set for today. None other than former ambassador Shi Mingde has been instructed by the Chinese to assess the mood in Germany toward China in advance. Naturally, something like this can’t be done via video call and Zoom meeting. So Shi had to pack his bags, fly to Germany and spend more than a week touring the country in November to talk to old acquaintances from politics and business.
Whether Shi’s tour has achieved anything remains to be seen. Newly elected German Chancellor Scholz presented his new China policy of “fair” and “critical” treatment. We’ll keep you updated in the coming days if there’s any news on the new government’s relations with China.
On Sunday, Hong Kong’s citizens will elect a new parliament. Marcel Grzanna spoke with former parliamentarian Ted Hui and analyzed how the election preparations are going. Hui assumes that Hong Kong citizens will not participate in the election. They simply do not feel represented by the “patriotic” representatives standing for election. Meanwhile, Hui and other democracy activists from abroad have called from exile around the world to not take part in the election.
The latest part of the Global China Conversations series discussed the global supply chain situation. The world of supply chains will not be the same after the pandemic, analyzes Finn Mayer-Kuckuk. If presents are missing under the Christmas tree, this is not only due to Covid. Politics is partly to blame. Unfortunately, the talk at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy also features a rather pessimistic forecast for 2022.
“Hello, comrade!” That’s how proper socialists in China greeted each other for a long time. Then the term was hijacked by homosexuals. Ever since Xi Jinping took office, he wanted to clean up the language, hoping to bring socialism back into line by rehabilitating the term “comrade”. After all, in the Confucian sense, language shapes reality, as our author Johnny Erling writes in today’s column.
Have a wonderful fourth advent.
Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam called the announcement that public transport will be free for all citizens next Sunday a “gesture of collective responsibility”. The idea is to get people to vote, Lam said. This incentive is unlikely to be of much significance, as most polling stations are close to where voters live. But it is a sign that there is concern about low voter turnout.
But it is also a paradox. Not long after the People’s Republic of China has seized de facto control of the parliamentary elections in Hong Kong, 10,000 police officers are apparently needed to protect the ballot. Past elections – back when the elections of political representatives were a lot more independent – were always peaceful, even without police presence.
Yet the National People’s Congress in Beijing imposed its drastic electoral law reform on the special administrative zone in March specifically to bring peace to the city. The authorities now seem to be playing it safe to keep the peace when a new parliament is elected under new conditions by the city’s 4.5 million eligible voters on Sunday (December 19).
Democracy activists such as Glacier Wong, who is currently living in Germany, Nathan Law, who is in exile in London, government opponent Sunny Cheung and former student leader Alex Chow, who are both in the US, have called for an election boycott these days. Just on Wednesday, four people were arrested in Hong Kong for inciting others not to vote in Sunday’s Legislative Council election or casting blank ballots. They allegedly had violated election regulations. Since the beginning of the year, Beijing has outlawed “inciting other people to cast a blank or invalid vote.”
For former Hong Kong MP Ted Hui, this does not come as a surprise: “I think the regime is very afraid of the result and is threatening people because of it.” Another arrest warrant has been put out for Hui, who lives in exile in Australia. According to him, polling institutes have also been cautioned not to cross the “red line”.
Many of his political comrades-in-arms of the pro-democracy wing have not managed to flee. Several of them are now in custody awaiting trial. They are accused of secession or undermining state power based on the security law. The new legal framework has opened up the ability for the authorities to define any form of political opposition as a criminal offense.
Many of the once-influential opposition figures have also been placed behind bars for almost a year now. The wave of trials against politicians and activists was postponed in summer until further notice. Former parliamentarian Hui sees this as a strategy by the Hong Kong government. Of the pro-democracy forces, no one could become active in the run-up to this year’s elections.
All the more campaigning is being done by the opposition, that is, the wing that favors the premature authoritarian seizure of the city by the People’s Republic of China. In a coordinated campaign, the public sector unions called on their fellow citizens to vote “only for patriots”. Beijing’s directive is that future Hong Kong should be governed and administered only by these patriots.
Naturally, this includes all civil servants and employees of the public service. Those who do not want to lose their jobs should do their best to give the impression that they are patriots who fully support Beijing’s line. To this end, the city even introduced a new law that requires public officials to take an oath to act patriotically – and thus in the spirit of the Communist Party.
But these calls seem downright grotesque and serve more as an attempt to give the elections a democratic veneer. The electoral system in any case leaves few openings for possible democratic forces. Their influence on the legislature will be very small.
Voters can now only shape who will hold 20 of the total 90 seats with their vote. The majority of the seats, 70 in total, are instead allocated by a committee that is close to the Beijing leadership. In the last election, 50 percent of the seats were still voted on by the people. All candidates also had to pass a suitability assessment. Anyone suspected of not being patriotic enough was stripped of his or her right to participate in politics.
The Chinese leadership in Beijing is thus ensuring that its influence in Hong Kong will become even greater. It is true that in the 1980s it signed a treaty with the then British colonial rulers that the city would retain democratic freedoms for 50 years after the handover to the People’s Republic in 1997. But just a few years after the handover, it became clear that Beijing was pursuing other plans and interpreting the treaty with the British at best as rough guidelines at best.
Because Hong Kong citizens also quickly realized that the rights promised to them would disappear faster than promised, the first protests against Beijing’s growing influence began at the beginning of the millennium. Resistance finally broke out in 2019 with a mass movement that brought several million people to the streets. Hong Kong’s government, with Beijing’s support and full force, struck back at the protesters. A year after the protest movement began, Beijing established new facts with the introduction of the Security Law.
“The democracy movement in Hong Kong has effectively ceased to exist,” notes ex-parliamentarian Hui. This is why the opposition’s resistance has been coordinated from outside the country for quite some time. Hui is now watching from afar, as elections are held next Sunday. 620 voting centers will be available. 38,000 administrative officials will oversee the election process. And the 10,000 police officers will ensure that there are no incidents that could cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Collaboration: Ning Wang
What was perceived as “supply chain disruptions” at the beginning of the pandemic is now a permanent state. Goods arrive late or are not available at all for weeks and months. The economy is short of parts, causing intermediate and final products to be unfinished, which in turn are missing elsewhere.
The sputtering supply chains are one of the reasons for rising prices worldwide. This makes them a key driver of inflation around the world. Now, just before Christmas, this phenomenon also plays another role. Popular presents are harder to come by than in normal years. This applies to video game consoles as well as fashion. Aldi customers have to wait for special offer products. In the USA, even Ikea is running out of furniture. Miele is cutting back the production of washing machines. The car industry is suffering huge losses due to production halts.
However, many of these problems are not only caused by the pandemic, but also by the behavior of politicians. This was one conclusion of the discussion event “Transforming Global Industrial Chains: Opportunities for China” by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. It was held as part of the Global China Conversations series. “Trade conflicts between China and the US have exacerbated the situation,” said Xu Qiyuan, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Even after the pandemic, the world of supply chains will not be the same.
The momentum towards more difficult trading conditions is also owed to the fact that all major trading blocs are trying to make their supply channels more robust. At first, this does not result in better supply – on the contrary. “The players in the global economy are erecting barriers, separating markets, and seeking greater control,” says Rolf Langhammer, professor emeritus at IfW Kiel.
Instead of working together to reduce vulnerability to disruption, the major economies are creating new uncertainties. At best, they are uncoordinated in their strive for the same goals. In many cases, they are even working against each other. Researchers point out that since 2017, the number of trade restrictions has risen steeply. Most of them were directed against China in one form or another.
China never had any interest in upending global trade in the process, CASS researcher Xu points out. “It was not and is not aiming to break away from the global economy.” In fact, the Chinese economy remains tightly integrated, as his data show. Direct investment also continues to flow in significant amounts. Investment in China also continues to be very rewarding for international players.
According to Xu, China’s own supply of vendor parts is particularly stable, on the one hand, because the country has a large vertical real net output ratio. On the other hand, China is at least as susceptible to disruptions as all other globalized economies. Since a lot of end manufacturing takes place in China, it is dependent on smooth imports of primary products. Sudden disruptions in trade are therefore mostly detrimental to China as well.
Economist Langhammer expects that supply chains will not necessarily become shorter in the future. Instead, they will be more regionally focused. Primary products will then tend to come from the same economic area. So instead of true robustness, there will be renationalization at higher costs. This is the consequence of several political regulations. One important motive here is the growing geopolitical rivalry with China. The reaction to this is a rapprochement between the US and the EU at China’s expense.
Earlier this week, G7 finance ministers also vowed to tackle supply chain problems in the future wherever possible. A possible collapse of supply structures is to be predicted and avoided in the future, said British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak. But the goal here was also to increase “resilience,” that is, resistance to disruptions. But that is precisely the effort that, according to Langhammer, increases discrimination in trade when everyone is doing it at the same time. So such promises do not necessarily indicate a reduction in protectionist tendencies.
Another political project with a significant impact on supply relationships is the requirement to comply with social and environmental standards. This is what the various supply chain laws intend. Germany and France already introduced such laws. However, the EU now wants to follow up with a stricter set of rules. While the motives behind this are noble, it adds to tensions with China. And it’s another trade hurdle that impedes the flow of goods.
Overall, the researchers at CASS and IfW are not very optimistic for the near future that the economic blocs will return to a universal policy of open markets. “We can only hope that the development will not be as negative as we predict in our scenarios,” says Wan-Hsin Liu from IfW Kiel.
China’s communists should be proud of their proletarian form of address, “comrade” (同志 tongzhi), even after 100 years. This is what their leadership wants. In 1921, they wrote into the founding decree, “Whoever wishes to join the Party, loyally accepts its program and policies, and is recommended by another member, regardless of sex or nationality, is our comrade.” Since the reforms began, however, the varnish has peeled off the word comrade. Local party bigwigs preferred to be called “boss.” What’s even worse, after the sexual emancipation in society, the LGBTQ movement hijacked the obsolete term. In scene slang, comrade became a form of address between lovers of the same sex. In 2016, the CP reclaimed its word. Since then, “within the Party, everyone must call themselves comrades again, without exceptions.”
Only the army always held the address “comrades” in high regard. Deng Xiaoping saw to that after the Cultural Revolution. As commander-in-chief, he had the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic celebrated with a military parade. For this purpose, the armed forces marching on October 1, 1984, had practiced a new salute. Deng drove past them in a red-flag limousine with the top down, shouting: “Comrades – I salute you!” (同志们好!) and “Comrades – You take great hardship!” (同志们辛苦了!). The soldiers shouted back, “Leader: we salute you!” and “we serve the people!”
The army has retained this parade ritual ever since, even under all of Deng’s subsequent successors up to the current Party and military leader, Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, the word comrade has once again become an integral part of Party jargon. In the communiqué just released after a three-day CCP economic conference, the closing paragraph features the word total of five times in a row. Xi calls on all “comrades of the whole Party” (全党同志), “leading comrades” (领导同志) and “responsible comrades” (负责同志) to fulfill the tasks for 2022.
Comrade is back in vogue. The two characters of the word mean “common will”. The Party had derived its loanword, as the Cihai Grand Dictionary explains, from a more than 2,000-year-old motto that “If we are of one mind, we are of one heart, and if we are of one mind, we are comrades.” (同德则同心，同心则同志). So it says in the historical annals of the Guoyu Jinyusi (国语-晋语四). At first, only Party members were allowed to call themselves comrades. After 1949, according to Cihai, it became a “general public form of address.”
This went well until, thanks to Beijing’s reform policy, the citizens got fed up with the egalitarian term. It no longer fit the “civilized society” they were striving for, nor the Confucian politeness they hoped for in social interactions. In 2010, the “service standards” of Beijing’s public transport companies reflected the new thinking. According to them, bus passengers should be addressed as “sir,” “lady,” or neutrally as “passenger” (乘客). Young people and children would be entitled to be called “little friends or classmates”. Only pensioners would be allowed to be called comrades – but only if there was no other way. Smugly, the Beijing morning paper Chenbao wrote: All elders should be addressed as either “Old Master or Old Teacher” and “only then Old Comrade.” (老师傅”、”老先生”，然后才是” 老同志). The Global Times at the time ran the headline, “Don’t call passengers ‘comrade’.”
It was even worse for orthodox communists: many CP members forbade themselves to be called comrade. They wanted to be addressed by their name and title. Local CP secretaries allowed themselves to be flattered by their subordinates as “Big Boss” (大老板) or “Boss Number 1” (老大).
The Marxists revolted, and even more so when the party’s most important term of solidarity was turned into a buzzword in everyday life. China’s gay and lesbian scene adopted the term from the gay community in Taiwan and Hong Kong as code words for their same-sex relationships. They did so openly. Since 1997, homosexuality was no longer a punishable offense in the People’s Republic, and from 2001 it was freed from the stigma of being a “mental disorder.” In 2008, filmmaker Cui Zi’en (崔子恩) directed an award-winning documentary “Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China” (誌同志) about sexual emancipation among “comrades” in the People’s Republic. It is still available on Youku in China. The movement’s confidence became apparent when its activists protested loudly in 2012 because China’s newly published “Modern Chinese Dictionary” did not dare to explain the second meaning of the word comrade.
This lasted till 2014, before the CCP, under Party leader Xi, stepped up to reclaim and rebuild the ideological positions destroyed by “cultural nihilism”. Party leaders in Guangdong and Ningbo were the first to ban their members from calling themselves and their superiors “buddy,” “chief” or “boss.” Xi eventually ordered that “within the party, everyone must once again address each other as comrades without exception” (党内一律称同志), as news portal CPC revealed in late 2016.
The hope that the rehabilitation and revitalization of the term comrade could turn things around and “set things right” is based on Confucian thought. Confucius had once answered his disciple Zilu’s (子路) question about what to do first when governing and establishing dominion over a state: “What is necessary is to rectify names (必也正名乎). If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success […] Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately (名不正，則 言不順；言不順，則事不成；事不成…。君子于其 言，無所茍而已矣).”
Following this wisdom, Xi is cleaning house ideologically. First within the Party. All of its members are to line up so that he can once again address them as “comrades,” just like the army at the big military parades.
Bing Dwen Dwen is the name of one of the two mascots of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The giant snowsuit-wearing panda was designed by Cao Xue, a chief designer at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. The fact that he is now waving to passers-by on the Wangfujing shopping mile in Beijing shows the message the CP wants to convey to the people in the country: the Games will take place! Recently, more and more foreign countries had signaled a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games in Beijing due to human rights violations against the Muslim minority of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. No amount of panda diplomacy will help there.
