"Parent official" is the old name for local officials, which reveals a strong sense of officialdom and the class concept of the old society.
It is clear that in the Ming Dynasty Gao Qi's "Shubo Chicken Affair", "Pi Haomin bullied his assets, falsely slandered the sages, and Yuan Ren lost his parents." In fact, the earliest can be traced back to the "Li Ji University": "Poetry" Cloud: 'Happy only gentleman, the parent of the people. What is good for the people, what is evil for the people, is called the parents of the people. In "Mencius Liang HuiWang": "For the parents of the people, the administration, is not free from leading the beast and eating people, and the evil is also in the parents of the people." "There are also accounts. In these pre-Qin texts, "parents" refer to the rulers of the people, or even the monarchs.
"Parent official" refers to a magistrate during the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, there were two very successful magistrates: the Summoning Ministers of the Western Han Dynasty and the Du Shi of the Eastern Han Dynasty. According to the Book of later Han, Du Shi was the Taishou of Nanyang and was deeply loved by the people, who compared it with the previous generation of summoning ministers, so there was a saying that "before there was a summoned father, and then there was Du Mu". Wang Yuwei of the early Song Dynasty wrote in the poem "Who Lives and Feels": "Ten thousand families call on their parents." His self-note: "The folk call for the parent official", which is the earliest source of comparing the magistrate to the parent official.
In feudal society, parents are the masters of their children, and at the same time, parents love their children the most, so parent officials have both leadership and love, so the so-called "parent officials" are actually a kind of praise from the people. At the same time, such parent officials are usually some relatively grass-roots officials.
In fact, in the use of Chinese, there is another use of "parent official", that is, to refer to the local official of the hometown. The ancients recommended officials first through the names of filial piety, honesty, goodness, and fangzheng, and later mainly passed the imperial examination, and once they became the imperial court's officials, for reasons of avoiding suspicion, they were often officials from other places. In this way, he left his hometown father and elder. And those big officials in the dprk, in addition to their own ancestral home in the capital, most of the parents are in the local area, so these people also call those hometown officials "parent officials", which is what we often call "hometown parent officials".
There is still a difference in the use of the two meanings, the former is the people's title for the chief, which is a kind of reverence and praise for the chief, while the latter is actually an honorific title for the high-ranking officials in the DPRK compared to the local officials whose status is much lower than their own, and it is also a kind of self-effacing expression, saying that the small officials in their hometowns are parents and officials to show that they have no shelf and respect each other, and second, the county officials are not as good as the current management, and they also hope that the other party will take care of their parents.