Trump’s mention of a ‘Chinese phrase’ may have puzzled some, but the US Marine Corps adopted gung-ho from the name of wartime cooperatives
3-MIN READ3-MINLiu ZhenPublished: 6:38pm, 25 Sep 2026Chinese 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?
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.
