Poor Service Common : In China, Customers Come Last

A few months ago Wang Bilin, a schoolteacher, complained to the National People’s Congress that shop assistants in Peking are downright sullen to customers who ask to examine goods before buying.

More recently Shu Shijie, the Communist Party secretary in Canton, boarded a flight on China’s national airline and was told that although he had been assigned a seat in the first row, he should go to the back of the plane. When Shu pointed out that a single airline official was occupying three seats, a stewardess told him that if he didn’t like it, he could “go back to the ticket office.”

These grievances, and others like them, are being aired with increasing frequency in official Chinese newspapers, at legislative sessions and even in literary works. Gradually the Chinese authorities have begun to acknowledge publicly the low level of service that the Chinese have to put up with.

Apathy, Grumpiness Common

On the streets, bus drivers close the door in people’s faces. In hospitals, patients wait for hours merely to register. In restaurants, waiters and waitresses are so apathetic that diners often have to get up and search for plates and chopsticks.

And in shops, the customers often find themselves treated with such grumpiness that a common expression in Peking is that “you can use money only to buy anger.”

Last June, the secretariat of the Communist Party Central Committee publicly urged the city of Peking to improve the quality of its services and the attitude of its service workers.

“Every day we talk of ‘serving the people,’ but actually we don’t have a full understanding of service,” the Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Bao observed the other day.

Industry in Infancy

Underlying the official Chinese campaign is an important economic motivation. China is trying desperately to develop a service sector to its economy, and it is starting virtually from scratch.

A study for the World Bank last year found that the percentage of Chinese employed in service industries is “strikingly small,” even in comparison to other poor and developing countries. Only 12% of China’s labor force is employed in services, a substantially lower percentage than in India and lower even than in Laos, Bangladesh or Sudan.

China’s minuscule service sector is an outgrowth of its history. For thousands of years China has had to put the overwhelming part of its work force into agriculture in order to feed its huge population.

After the Communist takeover in 1949, the party sought to industrialize rapidly, generally along Stalinist lines, so that most of the people not working the soil were assigned to manufacturing. The service trades were viewed as at best unnecessary and at worst downright bourgeois.

As a result, the service industries have until recently been shortchanged in terms of resources and personnel. People working in service jobs find themselves treated with much less respect than their friends or relatives on factory assembly lines.

Complaining for Years

“Many shop assistants, bus conductors and waiters find fault with their customers and try to annoy them, not because they really enjoy doing so but because their manners reflect their frustration at their own status,” a commentator in the China Daily observed last year.

The determined indifference with which service personnel go about their work is not in itself a new phenomenon. Exasperated foreign visitors have been complaining about it for years.

In the most recent such outburst, Anna Chennault, the widow of Lt. Gen. Claire Chennault, the Flying Tigers commander of World War II, wrote to the People’s Daily to complain that the Peking Friendship Store, the shop set aside for foreign visitors and privileged Chinese, offers “the rudest service in the world.”

She said that when she asked to see the date on a newspaper, she was told that she would have to buy it first. “They treat customers as if they were the enemy,” she said.

Now the Chinese themselves seem to be fed up with the poor service, and the government seems to be encouraging their complaints.

No one believes that indifferent service and intentional rudeness are something inherent in the Chinese culture. Marco Polo, after his 13th-Century trip to Cathay, wrote in glowing terms of “the polish, courtesy and respectful familiarity” with which the Chinese treated one another. He was the first of many foreigners to discover the Chinese tradition of li mao, or courtesy.

Spurred by Profit Motive

Today, visitors to Hong Kong can find some of the best service in the world, and some of the most highly developed service industries. In Hong Kong’s stores, hotels and offices, the immediate response to any request seems to be “no problem.”

Of course, in Hong Kong the people in the service trades have a financial incentive to be helpful. The small shop owner who locates a rare or little-produced item for his customer increases his profits. The taxi driver or bellhop with the friendly chatter makes it clear he expects a tip.

In China, tipping is forbidden, although in the southern province of Guangdong, which adjoins Hong Kong, the practice seems to be making a comeback.

The World Bank study suggested that to some extent, China’s failure to develop service industries has been an outgrowth of its centrally planned economy.

“The pattern . . . is characteristic also of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” the bank said.

Other analysts say that the low level of service in China is linked to the continuing scarcity of consumer goods. A store’s importance is measured by how much it has in stock, not by its sales volume. Sales personnel sometimes behave as though they would be personally pained to part with an item on the shelf, since replacing it might take weeks.

‘The Four Nots’

According to a joke heard here, shoppers in Chinese stores run up against “the Four Nots--the store does not have the item in stock; it will not arrive until the next day; it is sold out and not available, and it is not of any importance anyway.”

Apart from these economic factors, China’s service problems are the underside of its obsession with the importance of guanxi, or personal connections.

Special treatment is reserved for those with connections, and others are shunted aside. Looked at in reverse fashion, it is China’s inability to provide adequate services for every one of its great number of people that makes back-door connections so crucial.

After Anna Chennault’s letter about rude service was published in the People’s Daily, another letter writer complained that it would have been ignored if not for the fact that she was a prominent Republican Party member and a member of the U.S. Export Council.

“As domestic shoppers usually get much worse service than foreign tourists, it is extremely unfair . . . to call on Chinese shop assistants to be polite to foreign guests only,” said the writer, who identified himself only as “an overseas Chinese.”

Steps to Improve Service

Officials insist that they will take steps to provide better service. Some of this effort is aimed especially at tourists and other foreigners. The Peking Hotel, for example, has started a “smile campaign,” and hotel personnel try to get as many “smile cards” as possible from customers pleased with their work. Employees with the most cards win free weeklong vacation trips.

The Peking Friendship Store has set up a special service desk. Nevertheless, a Hong Kong woman living in Peking reports that recently a clerk in the store asked if she were Anna Chennault and, upon learning that she was not, became noticeably less attentive.

For the most part, the effort is directed at improving services not for foreigners but for ordinary Chinese. To this end, state-owned retail shops, restaurants, barbershops and bathhouses are being leased or contracted out to collectives or to individuals. Authorities say they will reduce taxes and cut the red tape for those engaged in service trades.

Some department stores are beginning to pay store clerks cash bonuses in accordance with the volume of goods they sell. In Peking, authorities have said that the same system of financial incentives will soon be applied to waiters, bus drivers, hairdressers, tailors, maintenance workers and bank cashiers.

“Workers should not share equally in bonuses; they should be paid according to the quality of their work,” Li Ximing, the secretary of the party committee in Peking, told a special conference on the service trades a few months ago. “We must provide good service, even when goods are short.”