People's Republic

People's Republic (sometimes Popular Republic) is a title that is often used by Marxist-Leninist governments to describe their state. Currently there are five states in world that call themselves People's Republics: Algeria, Bangladesh, China, Laos, and North Korea. These states are rarely true republics.

Examples include:

• Hungarian People's Republic (1918–1919, 1949–1989)
• Mongolian People's Republic (1924–1992)
• People's Republic of Albania (1946–1976)
• People's Republic of Bulgaria (1946–1990)
• People's Republic of Romania (1947–1965)
• People's Republic of China (1949- )
• People's Republic of Poland (1952–1989)
• People's Republic of South Yemen (1967–1970)
• People's Republic of the Congo (1970–1992)
• People's Republic of Mozambique (1975–1990)
• People's Republic of Angola (1975–1992)
• People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979–1989)

Other Communist Party-led states are/were sometimes referred to as democratic republics (e.g. the German Democratic Republic), or democratic people's republics (e.g. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

Other uses of the term

There is also a usage of the term "People's Republic" in United States political sarcasm: it is used to refer to any predominantly left-wing or liberal area, especially those cities with a large, liberal, university population – for example the "People's Republic of Berkeley" or "People's Republic of Austin".

It may have been first used this way in the late 1960s, when The People's Republic of Berkeley (California) was used to describe the site of the Free Speech Movement.

Other sighted instances of this usage include:

• "The People's Republic of Austin" (Texas)
• "The People's Republic of Chapel Hill" (North Carolina)
• "The People's Republic of Cary" (North Carolina)
• "The People's Republic of Vancouver (British Columbia)"
• "The People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts" (home of Harvard University)
• "The People's Republic of Hawaii" (according to Forbe's Magazine)
• "The People's Republic of Vermont"

It is possible that this usage is particularly prevalent in cases where a municipality represents an island of liberal politics within a conservative area.