Realize that your life in human society is limited.

[sky753]

First I have a question about your sentence I thought old age are reverted in China.Do you mean that judging from the tile LAO WANG ,Chinese like to be considered old age by others ?

I think your question is intresting .If lao(老) is placed in front of someone's surname when greeting ,the person who are addressed feel the addresser respect him.Such greeting is somewhat old-fashioned as the greeting tongzhi(同志),but you can often hear such greeting in daily life.Nowadays in China ,people prefer to call someone only with title placed before one's surname to show that the one being addressed has kind of status.Expression like wang lao ban (boss wang ) ,li jiao shou (professor li),ding lao shi (teacher di),ji zong (General manager Ji) etc are often used ,among which ,i think ,surname plus lao ban ,is the most often used.A vendor will call you ... lao ban when you do some shopping even though he doesn't actually recognize you.

The addressing root under the phenomenon ,in my opinion ,is that a great number of chinese are most concerned with money and status.Calling someone such way also is aslo adaptable to current chinese situation that is MAKING MONEY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT THE HIGHTEST PRIORITY

By the way ,同志 in chinese now means homesexual .

[englishstudent]

Thank you very much for answering my question and providing so much
additional information. Since my questions are specifically related
to Chinese language and culture, if you don't mind I would like to move this
discussion to the "Other Languages" forum, where I will open a new thread
but borrow your text from here. I will call the new thread "Addressing people in China". Thanks.