Communist bandit


"Communist bandit" is an anti-communist epithet directed at members of the Chinese Communist Party. The term originated from the Nationalist government in 1927 during the Chinese Civil War. Outside mainland China, some Chinese people now use the term "中共" to refer to the People's Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party. It could also be translated to the English term "commie".

Etymology

The characters for "Communist bandits" are composed as follows:
  1. Gòng is a shorter writing for the term meaning "communism".
  2. Fěi, "bandits"

    History

The term of "Communist bandits" to describe the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists. When the Imperial Japanese Army occupied parts of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation authorities used the term "Red bandits" and "Communist bandits". On July 15, 1947, Document 0744 ordered the CCP and its forces to be called "Communist bandits" as a form of rectification of names, to the exclusion of all other terms, such as "Red bandits". 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 Communist Bandit's Animalistic Life". In the 1980s, the term was replaced by "Chinese Communist Authorities".
The term is used today as an insult against the PRC, their sympathizers, or just Chinese mainlanders, particularly by Taiwanese independentists and Republic of China supporters. In 1996, Microsoft halted sales of its Windows 95 operating system in mainland China due to discoveries that it contained the term in Chinese-language input method 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, or Běihán gòngfei.
In May 2020, it became known that YouTube had been deleting any use of the term since October 2019. Posted comments containing the phrase would shortly disappear without a reason being given. Alphabet, owner of YouTube, said the removal of such comments was "an error".

Popular culture

There is a pastry shop in Chiayi, Taiwan named 共匪餅, meaning "Communist Bandit Pastries", which makes light of the martial law era epithet.