Tongzhi (term)

Tongzhi is a form of style used in China that taken on different meanings in the 20th century depending on context. It was first introduced into vernacular Chinese by Sun Yat-sen as a way of describing his followers. Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), tongzhi was used to mean "comrade" in a communist sense: it was used to address almost everyone, male and female, young and old. In recent years, however, this meaning of the term has fallen out of common usage, except within Chinese Communist Party (CCP) discourse and among people of older generations.

In contemporary Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong, the term mainly refers to LGBT people instead of the traditional political usage.

In party politics
It remains in use in a formal context among political parties in both mainland China and Taiwan. In the CCP, categorizing a person as a comrade is especially significant for a person who has been denounced or demoted, because it indicates that the party has not completely rejected the person as "one of its own". In Taiwan, it also remains in formal usage in party politics. For example, after losing the 2008 presidential election, Frank Hsieh said: 很多同志希望我能夠留到五月二十五日 'many comrades hoped that I could stay to May 25'. In October 2016, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a directive urging all 90 million party members to keep calling each other "comrades" instead of less egalitarian terms.

Military use
The word comrade is in the regulations of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) as one of three appropriate ways to formally address another member of the military ("comrade" plus rank or position, as in "Comrade Colonel", or simply "comrade" when lacking information about the person's rank, or talking to several people.)

LGBTQ community use
Since the 1990s, the term is, however, increasingly being used to refer to sexual minorities in Macau and Hong Kong, and is increasingly used in mainland China and Taiwan, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. This way of using the term was first adopted by Michael Lam, a columnist for the Hong Kong-based City Magazine, and was popularized by the inaugural Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1989, whose aim was to present same-sex relationships as positive and suggesting solidarity between LGBT people, while also providing an indigenous term to describe same-sex love.

Tongzhi is preferred over ), the formal word for homosexuality, in LGBT communities, where the latter is seen as overly clinical and pathological in its connotations. The use of tongzhi over tongxinglian roughly parallels the replacement of "homosexual" with "gay" in English-language discourse.

Although the term initially referred to gay (男同志 'male tongzhi) and lesbian (女同志 'female tongzhi)) people, in recent years its scope has gradually expanded to cover a wider spectrum of identities, analogous to "LGBTQ+". For example, Taiwan Pride can be translated literally as 'Taiwan tongzhi parade'. According to Chou Wah-shan, tongzhi is a fluid term that can refer to any person who is not heteronormative, as well as a means of signifying "politics beyond the homo-hetero duality" and "integrating the sexual into the social".