Meetings of China’s Communist Party are about to get rather entertaining. In a bid to restore discipline, the party has issued written guidelines that say all cadres should now greet each other as “comrade.” The trouble is that, having fallen into disuse among the general population, “comrade” is now a common greeting among gay people.
The directive was included in new rules published earlier in November that outlined stricter party governance, and which encouraged members “to further consolidate their communist faith.” According to the South China Morning Post, an article published on the party’s website last week claimed that reviving the term would help “build an atmosphere of equality”. [...]
There is also a generational element to this. “I know people in their sixties, for instance, who may from time to time say nan tongzhi, 男同志 (male comrade), or nü tongzhi, 女同志 (female comrade) to refer to men and women, with no apparent awareness that the term means anything else,” says Lucas Klein, assistant professor in the School of Chinese at Hong Kong University. No surprise, then, that the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, are all in their sixties and seventies.
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