Although often translated into English as “Mister,” the Chinese word xiansheng is technically a gender-neutral honorific. Like its Japanese pronunciation sensei, it merely refers to someone older or with more experience.

Just like sensei, however, xiansheng is typically applied only to men. And while there have been periodic pushes to de-gender the term, public opinion in China remains split on the issue. When the late, great literary scholar Florence Chia-ying Yeh was addressed as xiansheng during an appearance on China Central Television in 2020, some praised the choice while others wondered why accomplished women should be addressed using a title usually associated with men.

That debate is not new. Academics have been arguing over the merits of using xiansheng to refer to women for decades. In 2003, the famous linguist Zhou Youguang argued against the use of xiansheng to refer to women, saying it would cause confusion and could even be interpreted as chauvinistic. Two years later, another linguist, Xing Fuyi, argued the opposite, claiming that women’s use of xiansheng should be interpreted as a rebellion against the male-oriented social structure.

Neither argument is wholly satisfactory. The gendered use of xiansheng is something of a historical accident, one that can be traced to the tumult of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And while the idea of a gendered xiansheng may be dominant now, it is hardly the only defensible interpretation.

In its earliest usage, the term xiansheng was not limited to men. The word, which literally means “first born,” only gradually developed connotations like “older brother,” “older scholar,” or “old teacher” on the way to becoming an honorific for instructors, literati, Taoists, and medical doctors.

Most of these individuals were men, but not all. Even in medieval texts, we can see multiple examples of xiansheng being used to refer to women. For example, the “New History of the Tang,” finished in 1060 CE, records that Song Ruozhao, a talented woman official who lived in the early ninth century, was called xiansheng. In the Song dynasty (960–1279), Emperor Ningzong gave at least some Taoist priestesses the title of “Xiansheng of Emptiness and Spontaneity.” And until the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), prostitutes were also often called xiansheng.

So, if the term was used to refer to both men and women in ancient China, why do people nowadays believe that xiansheng should only be used to address men?

The answer lies in the introduction of the English term “Mister” to China by 19th-century traders and missionaries. A general honorific used only for men, early translators struggled with the term, first relying on transliterations like misi. But these failed to catch on, in part because they had little grounding in Chinese culture.

Eventually, English-to-Chinese translators set their sights on xiansheng. Unlike xiaojie, or “Miss,” it was not a particularly good match, but it nevertheless caught on by the 1860s, with many Chinese dictionaries and textbooks adopting xiansheng as the default translation of “Mister.”

Even then, the gendered use of xiansheng was not a given. Soon after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution toppled the Qing, the Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen called for the replacement of the Qing-era titles daren (“Excellency”) and laoye (“Master”) with new titles for a new China: xiansheng and jun (“Gentleborn”). Although Sun was more concerned with civic responsibility than women’s rights, his proclamation had an interesting side effect: Calling women xiansheng became a way to signal support for gender equality. By 1918, the intellectual and literary editor Liu Zhelu observed that, “The addressing of women as xiansheng has entered common usage with the establishment of the Republic of China.”

As the new government looked to change Chinese social attitudes, it broadened the use of xiansheng far beyond men. In 1934, the national government issued an order requiring common titles for men and women, including laoye, taitai (“Wife”), and xiaojie to be changed to xiansheng. In effect, this was an official recognition that xiansheng was gender-neutral.

There are countless cases of people using xiansheng to address ordinary women during normal communication in the Republic of China period (1912–1949). However, there were limitations to its adoption: Xiansheng was generally reserved for women who were unmarried, as well as those from the intellectual class or who were identified as “new women.” When it was applied to women outside these categories, it could cause irritation or confusion.

In essence, xiansheng developed two completely different meanings in modern China — one strongly gendered and influenced by Western discourse, the other universalist and a product of revolutionary ideology.

These two meanings would remain locked in struggle for decades. After 1949, the xiansheng concept was rejected for its class-based connotations and abandoned in favor of the also gender neutral tongzhi, or “comrade.” The scope of the term shrunk greatly, and it was generally used as a gender-neutral form of address for people not in the Communist Party of China, those without any Party affiliation, and ethnic Chinese living overseas.

Interestingly, it was the advent of “reform and opening-up” in the late 1970s, which brought increasing numbers of overseas Chinese to the mainland, that revived the gendered connotation of xiansheng. Searching for a polite, preferably Westernized term of address, mainland Chinese landed on xiansheng and its feminized counterpart, nüshi.

Translator: David Ball; editor: Cai Yiwen and Kilian O’Donnell; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Soong Ching Ling, better known as Madame Sun Yat-sen, holds a book under her arm. Pictorial Parade/Getty Images/VCG)