Professional life in China happens inside a messaging application. Contracts are discussed there, files are sent there, decisions are made there, and the person you are working with checks it two hundred times a day and their email twice. A foreign partner who works only by email is not being rigorous; they are adding a day to every exchange and are absent from the conversation where things are actually decided.
What to set up before you need it
- The messaging application itself, with a professional profile: your real name, your company, a photograph. A blank profile reads as a stranger.
- The professional variant used by companies, when your counterparts work with it — it keeps business conversations separate from personal ones and survives a change of staff.
- A way to share large files that works from both countries. Assume the service you use at home may not be reachable there.
- A video-call arrangement that both sides can actually join, tested once before the meeting that matters.
Keep the record, use the speed
Messaging is fast and it is a bad archive: decisions get buried, the person leaves, and the conversation is on a phone you do not control. The working arrangement that holds is to discuss and decide in the fast channel and then confirm in a written record — an email, a shared document — that both parties keep. This is not bureaucracy; it is what makes the fast channel safe to rely on.
A note on what this costs in attention
Being reachable in a messaging application means being reachable, including at hours that are not yours. Setting an explicit expectation early — « I answer between 9 and 19 Paris time, and urgently at any hour » — is better received than silence, and protects the relationship from the resentment that builds when availability is assumed and then withdrawn.
Availability and functionality of communication tools differ between the two countries and change. Test your arrangement before a trip or a critical meeting rather than during it.