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11. Working in Shanghai

Shanghai at a Glance

Business in Shanghai: Required Skills

Many business people use the metro to commute to work every day.

Skills and Qualifications

For example, recent job offers posted on the homepages of the AmCham and the German AHK Shanghai include automotive mechanical engineer; business research analyst; marketing manager for an equipment rental company, and assistant project manager for trade fair and tourism promotion.

Judging from this random selection, you can see that it’s better to have specialized knowledge in technology or business administration and then polish it up with Chinese language skills and cultural competency, rather than the other way round. “Hard skills” in marketing, sales, finance, consulting, IT, engineering, and high-tech as well as good to excellent professional qualifications are probably preferable to more academic degrees in Chinese Studies or Intercultural Communications.

Language Requirements

As mentioned above, a basic knowledge of the Chinese language might sometimes not even be necessary for working in Shanghai, especially not in technical positions. Many foreign-invested enterprises and multi-nationals use English as a lingua franca in the workplace, and proficiency in Chinese can be limited to specific job descriptions.

But – and this is indeed a very big but – language skills will probably give you a huge advantage over your competitors even if they aren’t mentioned in the job ad itself. Although you might not need them to go about your daily business, they will make for smoother dealings with your Chinese colleagues and business contacts. Moreover, the better you speak Chinese, the more jobs you will be able to choose from.

Chinese Dialects

Actually, the Chinese variety spoken in Shanghai is the most common dialect from the Wu Chinese language group. As such, it is not mutually intelligible with other Chinese languages / dialects like Cantonese (Guangzhou, Hong Kong), Min Dong (Fujian), or Mandarin (Beijing). 

However, with the foundation of the PRC in 1949, the central government in Beijing declared Standard Mandarin the official language in the entire country. At first, this lead to diglossia (i.e. coexistent use of two languages by the same community) among many inhabitants of the Shanghai area. Later on, with the influx of both migrants from other Chinese provinces and foreign nationals from overseas, Shanghainese was all but neglected. However, in recent years, there has been renewed interest in preserving and promoting the local Wu dialect, and you might pick up the odd regional colloquialism in the street.

Learning the Language

For business purposes, you should acquire some knowledge of Standard Mandarin.  While Mandarin lacks complicated inflection  and complex syntax, it does require certain other skills: The tonal properties make good listening comprehension and subtle differences in pronunciation invaluable, and the many Chinese characters make reading and especially writing more difficult than in languages with alphabetic systems.

Unless your job requires actual fluency in Mandarin, you shouldn’t worry too much about the potential difficulties in studying this language. The honest attempt alone demonstrates open-mindedness, good will, respect of and interest in another culture. Therefore, even speaking Mandarin badly may win your hosts’, coworkers’ or contact person’s favor as they will notice your obvious effort to speak their language.

We highly recommend you to start taking classes in business Chinese, which may even be tailored to a certain field of work, before you leave. The modern technology available to businesspeople can also help you with your language studies: for example, tonal listening and pronunciation exercises and Mandarin podcasts for your MP3 player, Chinese vocabulary trainers or character dictionaries as a smartphone app (e.g. iChinese), or hànzì drawing software for graphic tablets.