Communist bandit


Communist bandit is an anti-communist epithet directed at 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" to refer to Communist China or the Chinese Communist Party. It could also be translated to the English term "".

Etymology

The characters for "Communist bandits", or gòngfěi, can be analysed in the following manner:
  1. Gòng is a shorter writing for the term meaning "communism".
  2. 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 Communist Party of China was first heralded in the tumultuous years of the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists. On July 15, 1947, the Document 0744 ordered the Communist Party 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 Gongfei's Animalistic Life". In the 1980s, the term was replaced by "Chinese Communist Authorities".
The term is used today as a slur against Beijing authorities and their sympathizers, particularly by Taiwanese independentists. 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 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, owner of YouTube, said the removal of such comments was "an error".