Authorities in China's export-oriented regions have elevated support for merchants to secure orders overseas, including rolling out chartered flights and offering subsidies as the country relaxes its COVID curbs.

Pressure on Chinese exporters is mounting as orders have been trimmed and business links weakened since the outbreak of the pandemic three years ago. Believing that a face-to-face meeting is worth a thousand emails, local government departments are taking a lead in arranging these overseas trips to bolster business confidence.

Provincial governments in China's major export-oriented regions and manufacturing heartland of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong have all been organizing overseas trips for companies to ink deals since November.

Zhejiang commerce department officials and business representatives embarked on a 6-day trip to Germany and France to participate in exhibitions and carry out business negotiations last week. At the same time, Zhejiang officials announced that many more such trips would be arranged in the future.

Being a major player in China's foreign trade, Zhejiang's foreign trade dependency rate is around 50 percent in the past decade. The province aims to organize 1,000 group trips abroad joined by about 10,000 foreign trade companies in the coming year.

The news trended on China's Twitter-like social media platform Weibo on Wednesday with the tagline "Zhejiang will organize 10,000 enterprises to go abroad to win business orders" gathering more than 140 million clicks and comments within a day. Netizens praised the determination and swift action of the local government.

Other provincial authorities also made similar arrangements in November. Guangdong Province sent local merchants on chartered flights to exhibitions in the Southeast Asian region and Jiangsu Province organized business delegations to visit customers in Japan.

Approaching the year-end, Chinese foreign trade companies are busy grabbing orders and making arrangements for the coming year's operations despite global demand dampened by rising interest rates in major economies in the west.

By arranging overseas business trips, local governments are opening up business opportunities for Chinese foreign trade companies, sending a positive signal on stabilizing overseas orders and fueling the economic growth in China.