ABSTRACT

China officially opened its doors to the outside world in 1978, and since then, Chinese business communication has undergone tremendous development in terms of both frequency of use and influence. However, research on Chinese business discourse is still in its fledgling stage. This chapter begins with a brief review of the historical background of Chinese business communication and then moves onto an overview of the research on Chinese business discourse. Thereafter, it presents a case study that is based on corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the chairman’s statement in Chinese annual reports. The chapter concludes with recommendations for further research.