Shanghai Street View: Retiring Titles

This week’s Street View takes us off the roads of Shanghai and into the office, as the issue of job titles in the workplace made national headlines. It seems that Vanke (Shenzhen: 000002), the property giant better known for its apartment blocks than corporate practices, attracted big attention when its Shanghai office banned the use of a popular honorific title used by many workers to address superiors.

The story casts a spotlight on the issue of job titles and the important role they play throughout face-conscious Asia, especially in China. When I first arrived in the region back in the mid-1980s, I was immediately impressed by how much importance people placed on job titles, and also how they loved to give out business cards.
Of course I was unemployed at the time, making such cards unnecessary for me. But even today, I frequently find myself committing the faux pas of attending events without enough cards to hand out to everyone, from the biggest bosses to lower-ranking secretaries, most of whom will never refer to the cards again.

But first let’s review the news, which revolves around the use of the Chinese term zong to address someone whose rank is higher than yours, often a top company executive. The report I read translated the term as “boss”, but it’s really a bit more formal and respectful than that and therefore somewhat honorific. I honestly can’t think of any equivalent in English, probably because most people in the US don’t use titles anymore when talking to others.

Vanke’s Shanghai office announced the move in an internal notice, and said it was aimed at strengthening cooperation and shared responsibility. To show it was serious, it said that people who used the term could be fined 100 yuan, and suggested people call each other by their given names.

The move brought back memories of the time when I returned to China in the early 2000s, following a decade back in the US, and wasn’t sure how to address company officials anymore. When I lived in Beijing for a few years in the 1980s, tongzhi, or “comrade” was still the main way to address anyone, male or female, regardless of their rank. But that term had fallen out of favor by the early 2000s, and it didn’t seem that people had settled on any permanent replacement.

Convenient Ambiguity

That was when one of my Chinese friends told me he’d discovered that zong was quite a convenient way to address any higher level company official, especially when you didn’t know his or her specific title. No one would be offended or laugh at you for exaggeration if you called them zong. It seems the trend has gathered momentum since then, to the point where it’s almost become somewhat cliche.

Zong certainly isn’t the only mass title that’s become overused in today’s China. Two other big ones are shifu, which traditionally meant master but today refers to anyone who provides a basic service like a hair stylist or masseur; and laoshi, which traditionally meant teacher but today seems to be a form of address for anyone older or with more experience than you. Whenever I go out for dinner with one of my older local friends and his peers, the term laoshi is a probably uttered dozens of times throughout the meal.

Truth be told, these more generic titles are probably more desirable than the older style of calling someone by his or her official title. Back in the 1980s when many Chinese began shedding their old socialist habits, I was also struck by the numerous titles that people often printed on their cards, including all the associations and other groups they belonged to, as well as their actual work titles. Sometimes it was hard to figure out what exactly the person even did from looking at his card.

All of that brings us back to Vanke, and their banning of even this newer generation of more general titles like zong. The fact is that even though those these newer titles are less specific, they do still imply a certain status and therefore can be just a little too honorific or degrading, depending on which title you get labeled with.

That’s probably why many westerners have moved toward the practice of calling everyone by their given name, which implies a certain form of equality. At the end of the day people should be judged based on factors like character and job performance rather than titles. So perhaps in this sense Shanghai is being a corporate trendsetter, and people in the future will say the city was a business leader back in 2015 when its local Vanke office banned the use of overinflated spoken titles in the workplace.