The way Chinese address one another reflects major changes in Chinese politics and social life in the past century.

Before the communist victory in 1949, a Chinese would address an adult male stranger as “Xiansheng.” Literally meaning “Born Earlier,” Xiansheng is the equivalent of “Mister” or “Sir” in English. A married Chinese woman back then was “Taitai,” meaning “Grand Lady” or “Honorable Married Woman.” An unmarried young female was called “Xiaojie” – literally “Little Sister.”

After the communists came to power in 1949, their revolutionary culture swept across China, which, among other things, changed China’s daily-life protocol. Xiansheng, Taitai and Xiaojie were all considered bourgeois etiquette, which was to be disdained and shunned. In the spirit of egalitarianism, it became customary to address one another as “Tongzhi” – people sharing “Common Aspirations.” This term could be applied to male or female, old or young. “Please, old Comrade, could you tell me where I can find the Post Office?” Or, “Hi, this little comrade, go get me some water.” Or, “I’m talking about that female comrade over there.”

As time passed, revolutionary idealism receded, and the traditional Chinese instinct to differentiate among people to pay respect to people of higher political or social standing crept back. So, few Chinese now referred to communist leader Mao Zedong as Comrade Mao Zedong; he was now always Chairman Mao. And that head of the department in which you worked was no longer Comrade Zhang; at least to you, a low-level office worker, he was Director Zhang.

With the end of the Mao era in the l970s, the term Tongzhi or Comrade went out of use almost completely among common Chinese. Within the Chinese Communist Party and the Party-dominated government, the term is still very much alive. Most Chinese, however, are now back to addressing one another with terms such as Xiansheng, Taitai and Xiaojie. This makes a lot sense since communism is all but dead in China, preserved on paper only by the Chinese Communist Party. With Chinese citizens all busily making their own money, they are competing against one another in a free market and cannot be very well said to share “common aspirations” such building a communist society. So unless it is within China’s official circles, for one Chinese to address another average Joe (or whatever the Chinese equivalent) as “Tongzhi” or Comrade is just too ironical or satirical.

But all addresses seem to have just so much life in them. There is a tendency for them to be worn out. Young women in China today, for example, do not feel all that comfortable to be addressed as “Xiaojie.” The reason? In recent years that once quite respectable term has been used so frequently to refer to young women working in the sex industry – in other words, prostitutes – that the term itself has been tainted.

If not Xiaojie, what? We don’t know yet.