"Communist bandit" () is an
anti-communist
Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the ...
epithet directed at members of the
Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the
Nationalist Government in 1927. Nowadays outside
mainland China, some Chinese people use the term "中共" (literally "Chinese Communist") to refer to
Communist China or the Chinese Communist Party. It could also be translated to the English term "''
commie''".
Etymology
The characters for "Communist bandits", or ''gòngfěi'', can be analysed in the following manner:
# ''Gòng'' () is a shorter writing for the term meaning "
communism" (共產主義).
# ''Fěi'' () means "bandits". The term of ''fěi'' to excoriate the adversary was first used during the
Warlord Era, in the form ''feifei'', or "bandit troops".
History
The term of "Communist bandits" to describe the
Chinese Communist Party was began in the tumultuous years of the
Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists.
On July 15, 1947, Document 0744 ordered the Communist Party and
its forces to be called "Communist bandits" as a form of
rectification of names
The rectification of names () is originally a doctrine of feudal Confucian designations and relationships, behaving accordingly to ensure social harmony. Without such accordance society would essentially crumble and "undertakings would not be comp ...
, to the exclusion of all other terms, such as "Red bandits" (in Chinese 赤匪).
Along with the term ''fei'', the term was used in official documents to describe the authorities established on
Mainland China and their agencies, and in several slogans such as "Fight against Gongfei's Animalistic Life".
In the 1980s, the term was replaced by "Chinese Communist Authorities".
The term is used today as an insult against Beijing authorities, their sympathizers or just chinese mainlanders, particularly by
Taiwanese independentists and Republic of China supporters. In 1996,
Microsoft halted sales of its
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...
operating system in mainland China due to discoveries that it contained the term in Chinese-language
input method
An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...
software bundled with the operating system following police raids on computer stores. In addition, the term is also used towards non-Chinese communists or communist-governed countries, such as ''Yuenán gòngfei'' (, directed at
Communist Party of Vietnam
The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), also known as the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), is the founding and sole legal party of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Founded in 1930 by Hồ Chí Minh, the CPV became the ruling party of North ...
and the Vietnamese people), or ''Běihán gòngfei'' (, directed at
Workers' Party of Korea and the North Koreans).
In May 2020, it became known that
YouTube had been deleting any use of the term since October 2019.
Comments containing the phrase would disappear without a given reason shortly after being posted.
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letter (alphabet), letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character ...
, owner of YouTube, said the removal of such comments was "an error".
Popular culture
There is a pastry shop in
Chiayi
Chiayi (, Taigi POJ: ''Ka-gī''; ), officially known as Chiayi City, is a city located in the plains of southwestern Taiwan. Formerly called ''Kagee'' during the late Qing dynasty and ''Kagi'' during the Japanese era (), its historical name i ...
, Taiwan named 共匪餅 meaning "Communist Bandit Pastries” which makes light of the martial law era epithet.
See also
*
Mandarin Chinese profanity against Communists
*
Communization
Communization (or communisation in British English) mainly refers to a contemporary communist theory in which there is a mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post-autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like ...
*
Communist society
In Marxist thought, a communist society or the communist system is the type of society and economic system postulated to emerge from technological advances in the productive forces, representing the ultimate goal of the political ideology of ...
*
Communist Party of the Republic of China
References
{{wiktionary
Anti-communism in China
Anti-communist terminology
Mandarin words and phrases
White Terror (Taiwan)