On paper, Peugeot got its Chinese name exactly right. The brand is called 标致 (biāozhì), and 标致 is a real, everyday Chinese word. It means good-looking, well-proportioned, elegant. You'd use it to compliment someone's looks: 她长得很标致, "she's very pretty." It even sounds a bit like "Peugeot." Sound match, positive meaning, real word. Branding textbooks would give it an A.
And yet, if you spend any time reading marketing blogs about Chinese brand names, 标致 keeps popping up on the list of cautionary tales. The reason is a joke, and it's not a polite one. Some people say the name sounds like 婊子 (biǎozi), a vulgar word for a prostitute.
So which is it? Brilliant name or embarrassing blunder? As a linguist, I think the honest answer is more interesting than either, and it says a lot about how Chinese consumers actually treat foreign brand names.
Let's put them side by side the way a phonetician would.
In careful standard Mandarin, those are two clearly different words. The tones are different on both syllables, and "zh" and "z" are different consonants. No newsreader in Beijing is going to mix them up.
But a huge number of Mandarin speakers don't talk like newsreaders. Across much of southern China, speakers often don't distinguish the curled "zh, ch, sh" sounds from the flat "z, c, s" sounds. There's even a name for it, 平翘舌不分 (píng qiào shé bù fēn), "not separating flat and curled tongue." In those accents, plus a casual sentence where tones get squeezed, the two words drift a lot closer together. One European advisory firm that writes about Chinese brand names put it bluntly: in some regions the pronunciation is "dangerously similar."
So the joke isn't invented out of nothing. It's just not something a standard-Mandarin speaker would hear by accident. It's the kind of thing people find when they go looking.
Here's the bigger context that most of those cautionary-tale blog posts miss. Chinese car culture absolutely loves punning nicknames for foreign brands, and they're often rude.
BMW is famously 别摸我 (bié mō wǒ), "don't touch me," built from the letters B-M-W. Mercedes-AMG becomes 爱母鸡 (ài mǔ jī), "love the hen." Porsche, which is officially 保时捷 (Bǎoshíjié), gets teased as 破鞋 (pòxié), "worn-out shoe," an old insult for a woman with a bad reputation. The linguistics blog Language Log has collected a whole list of these.
Notice something? BMW and Porsche have done just fine in China. A cheeky nickname doesn't sink a brand on its own. Chinese consumers play with these names because they're paying attention to them. Plenty of the nicknames are half affectionate.
If the name isn't the villain, why is Peugeot's China story such a rough one? Follow the business, not the pun.
Peugeot was one of the very first Western carmakers into China. Guangzhou Peugeot was set up on September 26, 1985, as a joint venture with the Guangzhou city government. It built the Peugeot 505 and 504, mostly for taxi fleets and government use. But the venture never localized its supply chain well. One industry analysis says over 60% of parts came from abroad, which pushed prices up, and local suppliers that did come on board turned out parts that Chinese buyers noticed were inferior. By 1993, Guangzhou Peugeot sold just 2,544 cars, while Shanghai Volkswagen built at least 146,000. By 1996 the Guangzhou government said it no longer wanted a French partner, and Peugeot was out by 1997. Guangzhou went on to partner with Honda instead.
Peugeot came back in 2002 through a joint venture with Dongfeng, under the name 东风标致 (Dōngfēng Biāozhì). For a while it went well. The Dongfeng venture with Peugeot and Citroën peaked at around 734,000 vehicles in 2014. Then it slid, hard: about 253,000 in 2018, under 50,000 in 2020, and roughly 56,000 in 2024. Analysts have pointed to pricing, trim levels that left out features buyers wanted, and tough competition from Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan and, increasingly, Chinese brands.
Through all of that, the name 标致 never changed. It sold 734,000 cars a year with the same name it sold 50,000 with. That's about as clean a natural experiment as you'll get: the name was a constant, the business was the variable.
I don't tell clients that 标致 is a disaster. I tell them it's a great example of something they need to plan for. When you choose a Chinese name, you're really choosing three things:
You can't control all of it. But you can test for it before you file a trademark, by reading the name aloud with speakers from the north and the south, and by asking native speakers the awkward question directly: "What's the worst joke someone could make about this?" Better to hear it in a meeting room than in a comment section.
If you're naming a brand or product for China, try the free Chinese Name & Brand Checker, or see how I help companies stress-test names on the Work With Me page.