In 1924, Sun Yat-sen stood before a crowd in Guangzhou and called his followers tongzhi — comrades, literally “those who share the same will.” The word was ancient, found in classical texts two thousand years old, but Sun gave it a modern political charge. By 1949, tongzhi had become the standard form of address in Communist China: cashiers called customers tongzhi, soldiers called officers tongzhi, strangers on buses called each other tongzhi. It was a word that erased hierarchy and replaced it with ideology.
Then, in 1989, at the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, something unexpected happened. Activists began using tongzhi to refer to themselves — not as a political statement, but as a linguistic one. They were tired of Western labels like “gay” and “lesbian,” which felt imported and clinical. They wanted a Chinese word for a Chinese experience. They chose tongzhi — the same word their parents had used in the Cultural Revolution — and gave it a new life.
📖 Origin Story
The original meaning of 同志 (tóng zhì) was literary and poetic: two people who shared a moral or intellectual purpose. Confucian scholars used it to describe true friendship. Revolutionaries used it to describe political solidarity. When the Chinese Communist Party adopted it as the official term of address in the 1950s, it became simultaneously ubiquitous and emptied of meaning — everyone was a tongzhi, which meant no one was.
The LGBTQ reclamation of tongzhi began in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, spearheaded by activists and filmmakers who wanted a culturally rooted identity term. The choice was radical: they were taking a word associated with state orthodoxy and using it to describe a identity that the state officially condemned. By the 1990s, tongzhi had spread to Taiwan and mainland Chinese internet communities, where it became the preferred self-designation for many LGBTQ individuals — a quiet, subversive act of linguistic resistance.
English-speaking academics and journalists began encountering tongzhi in the 2000s, primarily through queer studies literature and reporting on Chinese LGBTQ activism. Unlike “gay,” which carries specific Western cultural baggage, tongzhi offers a distinctively Chinese framework for understanding sexuality and identity — one that does not necessarily map onto Western categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
🌍 Why It Matters
Tongzhi matters because it is one of the most politically and culturally complex Chinese words ever to enter English. It is simultaneously a term of state ideology and queer resistance, a word used by Mao and by Hong Kong drag queens, a linguistic bridge between revolutionary China and contemporary LGBTQ activism.
It also matters because it challenges English speakers to rethink their assumptions about sexuality and identity. The Western framework assumes that sexual identity is a fixed category — you are gay, straight, or bisexual. The tongzhi framework is more fluid, more culturally embedded, and less interested in individual classification than in collective belonging. When a Chinese person calls themselves tongzhi, they are not just naming a sexual orientation. They are claiming a cultural lineage.
✍️ Usage in Context
The Academic Conference:
“My paper examines tongzhi identity in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema.” “Do you mean gay identity?” “I mean tongzhi identity. ‘Gay’ is a Western category. ‘Tongzhi’ is a Chinese lived experience. They overlap, but they are not the same.”
The Family Conversation:
“Are you… tongzhi?” “Mom, I didn’t know you knew that word.” “Your uncle used it at the factory in 1976. Everyone was tongzhi then. It meant something different.” “It still means shared purpose. Just a different purpose.”
The Activist Meeting:
“Should we use ‘LGBTQ’ or ’tongzhi’ in the English press release?” “Use both. ‘LGBTQ’ gets us international funding. ‘Tongzhi’ reminds us who we are when the funding runs out.”