6-Day China Corporate Visits: Xi'an & Suzhou Plants

Morning — Arrival and Transfer
Your guide and driver greet you at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport and transfer you by private vehicle to your hotel. The morning is kept light so you can recover from the overnight flight.

Afternoon — Welcome Briefing
A short briefing at the hotel sets the context for the days ahead: how Xi'an moved from the eastern terminus of the Silk Road to a modern industrial and logistics hub, and what the enterprise visits on this programme will show you.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
A welcome dinner introduces the group and the local hosts. Shaanxi cooking is the vehicle: cold noodles, lamb, and the wheat-based dishes that define the Guanzhong plain.

Meals
Breakfast, Dinner included.

Morning - LONGi and the shape of the industry
LONGi is headquartered in Xi'an and is the largest producer of monocrystalline silicon wafers in the world, the substrate every mainstream solar panel is built on. The company was founded in 2000 and has ranked first globally in cumulative wafer shipments for ten consecutive years. A host from the company opens the day with a briefing on where the value in a solar module actually sits, how wafer, cell and module pricing is set, and why the industry has spent the last three years in a hard price cycle driven by capacity running ahead of installation demand.

The briefing is deliberately commercial rather than technical. For a buyer, a distributor or an EPC contractor, the questions that decide a contract are capacity and delivery reliability, technology roadmap, certification for the destination market, and whether the supplier can hold a price through a long-dated order. Ask them directly in the room rather than through a broker.

Midday - technology and the line
The company's technology position is the part of the visit that is hardest to read from a datasheet. LONGi holds the world record for silicon solar cell efficiency at 27.3 percent for a crystalline silicon-perovskite tandem cell, and had reached mass-produced module efficiencies of 24.8 percent on back-contact technology by December 2025. Where access allows, your host walks you through a demonstration or production area and explains the shift from TOPCon architectures towards back-contact and tandem, and what that means for a module bought today and installed next year.

If a site visit is not possible on your dates, the technology session is delivered at the company's exhibition and conference facility, and the substitution is confirmed in writing before arrival.

Afternoon - the supply chain round table
The afternoon widens out from one company to the chain around it. LONGi anchors a photovoltaic cluster in Xi'an and the surrounding province, with wafer, cell, module, glass, silver paste, inverter and mounting suppliers feeding the same base, and the company leads a regional photovoltaic industry alliance that pulls in hundreds of upstream and downstream firms across Shaanxi and neighbouring provinces. Your host sets out how that cluster works in practice: which stages a buyer can source locally, what lead times look like, and which parts of the chain remain concentrated elsewhere.

The session is structured around your own procurement position, so bring your specification, your target market and your volume. For European and North American buyers we cover certification and the compliance documentation your customs authority will want, and for buyers in the Gulf and Southeast Asia we cover the delivery routes and the grid-scale project cycle. LONGi's products reach more than 150 countries and regions, and the company runs manufacturing outside China, which matters if your market applies local-content rules.

Evening - business dinner
Dinner is Shaanxi, at a table rather than a buffet, with the introductions and follow-up meetings your delegation asks for arranged in advance where we can. Most delegations use the evening to narrow a shortlist rather than to open one.

Business note
Company visits are subject to host calendars and are confirmed in writing before arrival. Where a named facility cannot receive a foreign delegation on your dates, an equivalent company in the same segment is named as a substitute in advance. Full names, nationalities and passport numbers for all delegates are required at least fourteen days ahead so that visitor clearance can be processed. Nothing in this day constitutes a supply agreement; all commercial terms are negotiated directly between you and the supplier.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Xi'an High-Tech Zone or city centre.

Morning - the port and the corridor
Xi'an International Port is the largest rail logistics base in China and holds the country's first three-track, six-line railway container centre station. It is also where the China-Europe Railway Express in Xi'an starts, and the numbers explain why the corridor has become a genuine alternative to sea freight for the right cargo: in 2025 the Xi'an service ran 6,037 trains, up 21.1 percent on the year, carried 6.96 million tonnes of freight, up 23.7 percent, and dispatched 598,000 TEU, up 14.1 percent, with the core metrics again leading the country.

A host from the port side opens the day with the geography of the network. The main line runs to Central Asia and on into Europe, with 1,291 trains to Central Asia in 2025, up 60.6 percent, and scheduled timetable services to Duisburg, Prague and Budapest that run to a fixed timetable rather than a booked slot. The trans-Caspian route, which crosses the Caspian and Black Seas by ship, holds transit times at around eleven days and accounts for roughly half of China's total on that corridor.

Midday - operations, customs and the bonded zone
Where access allows, you walk the container handling area and the customs and inspection facilities with your host, and see how a consignment is booked, consolidated, inspected and released. The operational detail is the point of the visit: what documentation has to be right before a container is accepted, how release is handled for a foreign buyer, and how the port has cut its own processing times - the digital port system links customs, railway and overseas partner data, and freight clearance has been made 24-hour and fully traceable.

The bonded and special-category facilities matter for specific trades: an expanded designated supervision site for imported grain, dedicated cold-chain services, and a cross-border e-commerce operation. If your goods need any of those, say so at booking and the visit is built around the right terminal rather than the general one.

Afternoon - cross-border logistics round table
The afternoon turns the tour into a commercial session. Rail against sea and air is an arithmetic question rather than a slogan: what freight class suits a container train, what the rate and transit comparison looks like against a sailing from Shanghai or Ningbo, where rail wins on capital tied up in transit, and where it does not. Your host covers liability and insurance, Incoterms for rail, and what happens when a consignment is delayed at a border.

The corridor has also become a two-way route. The port has built a matching terminal in Kazakhstan and describes the relationship as hub to hub, with the Xi'an end handling Kazakh cargo in the other direction, and companies from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan have formed joint ventures or opened offices here. For a delegation looking at Central Asian or European distribution, that is the part of the network worth understanding before committing to a route.

Evening - at your leisure
The evening is free, or we can arrange a Shaanxi business dinner with the follow-up meetings your delegation wants. Say which at booking.

Business note
Port, terminal and customs visits are subject to operator calendars and security clearance and are confirmed in writing before arrival. Where a named facility cannot receive a foreign delegation on your dates, an equivalent facility in the same function is named as a substitute in advance. Full names, nationalities and passport numbers for all delegates are required at least fourteen days ahead. Freight contracts are placed in your own name, so you keep control of the relationship and the liability.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Xi'an city centre.

Morning - the rail line south
Today is a travel day of about six hours, and it is worth watching the country change. The line runs south out of the Guanzhong plain through the Qinling tunnel, across Henan and Anhui, and down into the Yangtze delta, where the fields get smaller, the water gets closer to the surface, and every village sits on a canal. Suzhou, at the end of it, has been a canal city for two and a half thousand years. The Grand Canal itself was begun in the sixth century BC, assembled into an imperial trunk route under the Sui around 605-609 AD, and finished at something over 1,700 kilometres from Beijing to Hangzhou. Its Suzhou section is part of the UNESCO inscription, which was made in 2014 and covers the whole surviving system across eight provinces. What the canal carried first was grain tax, and then everything else: silk, timber, salt, tea, and the scholars and merchants whose money built the gardens you will see tomorrow.

Afternoon - arrival and check-in
You arrive at Suzhou North in the middle of the afternoon, where your guide and driver meet you, and transfer to a hotel inside or beside the old city, near the canal. Suzhou is a working city of over ten million people and it does not look like a museum; the old quarter survives in patches, in the lanes threaded between the waterways, and your hotel is close enough to walk into that.

Evening - Shantang Street
Shantang Street is a seven-li stretch of the old canal waterfront - about three and a half kilometres - laid out in 825 by the Tang poet Bai Juyi, who was then prefect of Suzhou and a competent engineer as well as a poet. The street runs with the water, one side for shops and one side for houses, and the canal has been dredged, straightened and rebuilt many times since; what survives is the pattern rather than the fabric. Walking east from the gate, or taking a small boat from the landing stage, you pass whitewashed walls, grey tiles, arched stone bridges and the low gables of the region, with the upper windows of the houses hanging directly over the water. Dinner is local, and Suzhou cooking is sweet, and proud of it: squirrel mandarin fish, scored and fried so that it opens like a tail, braised pork belly and, if it is the tail end of spring, river shrimps with green tea leaves. The restaurants on the street itself are busy and touristy; two lanes inland they are better and half the price, and your guide will point out which is which.

Cultural Insight - reading the inscription
The Grand Canal was recognised under cultural criteria for the way it records an imperial engineering tradition of lock, dam and sluice building, and for the way it bound the northern capital to the southern rice bowl for more than a thousand years. What is inscribed is not a single monument but a system: a series of surviving sections, water-control works, granaries, official residences and city quarters spread across eight provinces, of which Suzhou's canals and the stretch at Shantang are among the best preserved. It is a useful first UNESCO site for this itinerary, because it makes the point that China's World Heritage is often about systems - water, transport, ritual, trade - and not only about buildings you walk through. Ask your guide on the drive down what the canal carried in each dynasty; the answer changes the way you look at every town between Beijing and Hangzhou for the rest of the trip.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Suzhou.

Morning — the Production Floor
The plant is matched to your sector and confirmed in writing before arrival, with a substitute named in advance if the first choice cannot receive a foreign group on the day. Visitors are asked for full names and passport details ahead of the visit for site access, and photography inside the plant is restricted. You walk the floor with the line manager rather than a tour guide: the machining or forming stages and the transfer between them, where parts are gauged, and how a line is set up and changed over. The questions worth asking are the ones a catalogue cannot answer - what the cycle time actually is, how much of the line runs unattended, and what happens when a tool wears.

Late Morning — Inspection and Traceability
The quality manager takes the group through the inspection stages: incoming material checks, first-article inspection on a new part, in-process gauging and final inspection, and the record that ties a finished batch back to a material lot. Ask which measurements a customer is permitted to audit and which are held internally, and what the plant does with a batch that has to be held back.

Afternoon — the Commercial Session
A working session with the plant's sales and engineering leads on the practical side of placing work here: minimum order quantities, lead times for a first order against a repeat, who pays for tooling and how it is amortised, the sample and approval process for a new part, payment terms, and what changes if volumes double. Bring your own drawings or specifications if you want the conversation to be concrete rather than general.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is free. Your guide will suggest restaurants near the hotel and can arrange transport back into the park district if the group wants to keep talking over dinner.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Suzhou city centre (4-star international brand or equivalent).

Morning — inside a Suzhou plant
Suzhou runs China's second-largest manufacturing economy, and the Industrial Park concentrates the part of it that foreign buyers normally come to see: automation, electronic components, precision equipment, medical devices and new-energy components. The morning is spent inside one operating plant rather than at a showroom. You walk the production floor with a line manager, see the automation and quality-control stages, and take a question-and-answer session on lead times, tooling changes, capacity and the practicalities of onboarding a new customer.

The exact plant is matched to your sector and confirmed in writing before arrival, with a substitute named in advance if your first choice cannot receive a foreign group on the day. Visitors are asked for full names and passport details ahead of the visit for site access, and photography inside the plant is arranged with the host.

Midday — industrial upgrading debrief
Over a working lunch with your guide and facilitator, the practicalities are pulled together: how Chinese manufacturers in this corridor have moved from contract assembly towards design and system supply, what that has done to minimum order quantities and unit pricing, and which supporting services — industrial design, tooling, certification, bonded logistics — sit within the same park. Delegations that came for sourcing leave this session with a clarified shortlist; delegations that came for partnership leave with a view of who is worth a second meeting.

Afternoon — Lingering Garden and departure
Suzhou's classical gardens were inscribed by UNESCO as the Classical Gardens of Suzhou in 1997, with a further group added in 2000. The Lingering Garden is one of the four best-known gardens of the city and is the right closing stop for a working programme: a compact sequence of courtyards, corridors, rockery and water, built between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, designed so that every turn reframes the view. From the garden you are transferred to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station or to a Shanghai airport for your onward flight.

Business note
Company visits are subject to host approval and visitor-calendar availability. Names, nationalities and passport numbers of all delegates are required at least fourteen days before the visit so that site clearance can be processed.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch