In the Realm of Comrades? Scattered Thoughts Occasioned by the Centenary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921-2021

Abstract

This brief essay meditates on the advent of the ideal of horizontal social relations, exemplified in the early CCP years in the political term, comrade (tongzhi). It takes up Qu Qiubai as exemplary of a Marxist political thinker whose commitments to horizontality/comrade relations can be illustrated through his theories of literature, translation and language. It proposes that despite Xi Jinping's recent rhetorical admonishments to re-activate comrade as a political term, it is the LGBTQ community's appropriation of comrade in contemporary China that actually holds the potential for a substantive reanimation of the utopian ideals begun a century ago.