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The Pearl River Delta, and what business Chinese sounds like
The Pearl River Delta — Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan and their neighbours, with Hong Kong and Macau at the mouth — is the densest manufacturing region on earth and the place where the phrase made in China came from. Dongguan alone, a city most foreigners have never heard of, has some ten million people and for a long stretch produced a sizeable share of the world's shoes, toys, furniture and electronics. The whole delta is now often described as a single conurbation of more than seventy million. Two things about it have changed in the last decade and a visitor should know both. Labour costs have risen substantially, so the lowest-margin assembly work has been moving inland or out to Vietnam and Bangladesh, and what remains in the delta has moved up: components, electronics, robotics, and design rather than assembly. And the composition of the workforce has changed as the generation that left farms for dormitories in the 1990s has been succeeded by one with more choices, more education and less appetite for the factory floor — a shift Chinese employers discuss constantly and often with irritation. On the language, this lesson is doing something narrow and useful. Chinese has a commercial register that is neither classical nor conversational, and four constructions carry most of it: 关于 and 对于 to announce a topic, 方面 to narrow a claim, and 进行 with a nominalised object where speech would use a plain verb. Add 尽快, 予以, 有关, 如下 and 特此 and you can read most of a commercial email. The learner's error is not failing to produce this register but producing it everywhere — 我要进行吃饭 is a sentence nobody has ever said, and 关于晚饭 to a friend is comic. A practical note on how business conversation actually goes. 李经理's last line — 有问题随时打电话，别客气 — is doing real work: it establishes that the relationship continues past the transaction, which is the point of 关系 and the reason Chinese business meetings spend time on things that look like small talk. Expect the meal afterwards, from lesson 71, to matter as much as the terms. And expect a quoted price to be a starting position when the volume is open — 量大可以再谈 is an invitation, not a refusal.