The Chinese roots of ‘gung-ho’ as Trump and Xi look to shared history

Chinese viewers watching Donald Trump welcome Xi Jinping to the White House on Thursday may have been puzzled by the US president’s reference to the “Chinese phrase” gung-ho. Turning to Baidu – or increasingly, Doubao, the country’s most popular AI chatbot – they may well have asked: what Chinese expression is he referring to?

It sounds Chinese, but gung-ho is neither part of everyday usage nor an idiom drawn from classical texts – making this moment almost as baffling as when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the phrase “unleash Chiang [Kai-shek]” while discussing an escalation of strikes on Iran.

The word does have a genuine Chinese origin though. Gung-ho, or in pinyin, gong he (工合) is short for gongye hezuoshe (工业合作社) – literally, “industrial cooperatives”. These were grass-roots labour units set up in China in 1938 to produce small industrial supplies to support the war effort against the Japanese.

The term was introduced into the English language by Evans Carlson, a US Marine Corps officer who served as a military observer of Chinese resistance forces in 1937-38. Impressed by the cooperative spirit of the workers, Carlson inaccurately interpreted the organisational acronym as a cooperative motto meaning “work together – work in harmony”.