Tovarishch

I learned the coolest thing in Chinese class tonight.  We were asking the teacher to tell us useful phrases when dealing with taxi drivers.  Up until this point she’d been teaching us “businessman’s Chinese,” reciting useless sentences like “Tomorrow I will go to a business meeting.” Considering that I’m a complete moron and I wear Metallica t-shirts to work this is beyond pointless for me to know.  But learning how to say “Which bar has the best hookers?”, that’s something that will come in useful.

At any rate, the phrase you use to refer to a taxi driver is shī fu, which is a respectful term meaning “skilled worker.” You can actually use this to refer to just about any professional person.  Since I knew this already I asked her about the term’s etymology, and she began going into the history of this particular honorific.

Mao was heavily influenced by Stalin and Soviet communism.  During the Mao years, just like in the USSR, people referred to each other as “comrade,” which in Chinese is tóng zhì.  Literally translated this means “similar purpose,” indicating a fellow traveler on the road to communist glory.  At any rate, during that time period, just like in the USSR, people worked in factories and such.  When someone went to work in a factory they were apprenticed for two years to someone who was experienced.  (In other words, someone who knew how to work a lathe or a machine press and could churn out useless industrial products.) The apprentice would refer to his master as shī fu, the skilled worker, with the apprentice being the unskilled worker.  During this period tóng zhì was a common way of referring to almost everyone else.  Just like in the USSR, it was placed in front of job titles and other names.  You would refer to you doctor as “Comrade Doctor,” or your father as “Comrade Baba,” (literally “Comrade Daddy"). 

Mao died in 1973, and with his passing a lot of the Soviet-style traditions died as well.  By the 1980s it was gauche to refer to someone as tóng zhì.  In its place the term shī fu became common, and this is still in use today.  It’s simply a polite way of referring to someone doing a job.  (Can you imagine referring to someone that way in the west?  “Excuse me, skilled worker, can you please take the next exit?")

Here’s the funny part.  Recall the literal meaning of tóng zhì, “similar purpose.” In recent years this has become, in China’s metropolitan areas, a term to describe a homosexual male.  “Similar purpose.” I imagine that if Mao knew about this he’d be spinning in his grave.  However, since you can go to Tiananmen Square and see his mummified corpse, I think that particular western saying is not all that applicable.