About
Charlie Lin

Hi, everyone, this is Charlie Lin. I am a business person born and raised in China. I said so because I want you to be impressed with my amazing English language skills though I don’t really stay outside China much, lol!

Not a single word in this whole description or the website, in general, was “ghostwritten” by anyone else other than myself, not a Fiverr seller, not an iWriter, though I know most impressive English websites in China are created this way.

I like to communicate with international people in pure English as much I can, I enjoy using English in conversations, text messages, emails, articles, speeches, negotiations, and everywhere else I have the ability to communicate with people (including in English corners when dating with Chinese girls who find me super attractive when I use it as they said my English indicates a sense of gentlemen 🙂

I am literally a fake Chinese as well as a fake American! Well, or I’d prefer to be introduced as a global citizen that strides over the ridge between east and west.

I don’t wear suits really, but this photo is so far the best presentation of me, I got it done in a studio at the cost of 50 bucks in the Futian district of Shenzhen. You will see this one t as my profile image a lot. I call this DreamWorks of myself.

About My Background

Everyone has a past, so do I. Not a super glorious one, but could be interesting if you happen to be free at this moment whether you incidentally hit on this page or particularly want to check about who is this Charlie Lin guy? Is he even legit?

I was born and raised in a small county named Yudu in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, a province right on the north of Guangdong Province(where Shenzhen is). My hometown was the starting point of the Long March for the First Red Army. Chinese President Mr. Xi Jinping has just visited my hometown on May 20, 2019, due to its unique legacy in Chinese history.

I studied English at Jiujiang University, a college close to Mount Lu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and a prominent summer resort at home and abroad since ancient China. The father of Pearl Buck was one of the first five missionaries to acquire property on the mountain.

I chose English to learn because I barely wanted to think too much about what to learn as I was so crazy about learning English since middle school, sorry to embarrass myself, but in China usually, only girls tend to be so. From a very early age I started to indulge in reading out loud textbooks after cassettes(sometimes pirated ones) and later in high school imitating famous English speeches, listening to Forrest Gump movie scripts(hundreds of times!), at college learning from masterpiece translation between Chinese and English essays, memorizing GRE vocabulary, digesting original English readings intensively… I made friends with a Pakistani medical doctor who at the age of 60 back then told me I had an unusually higher level of mental maturity than my real age and a French teacher who wanted me to become his business partner in organizing Chinese cultural exposure adventures for Europeans, a plan however that finally was canceled due to his personal reasons.

However, what I really became finally was a nerd 🙁 At college, I made no girlfriends, didn’t take part in any form of the student union, didn’t like hiking a lot though I was so close to a UNESCO World Heritage mountain. My plan to pursue grad school life(in becoming nerd again) failed when I sloppily took out my exam paper by mistake, a fatal zero-mark causing the error which sentenced my 1 year of exam preparation to death(reassuringly I still got 132 out of 150 in the essay translation in the afternoon same day, as dead as I was at heart).

President Xi Jiping visited my hometown on the summer of 2019, I took a photo of the house he actually went to, you can tell that from the photo frame hanging on the wall on the right side image.

Me as a volunteer at an International Conference about Mount Lu and Other Mountains in the world

Me and my Pakistani friend Burney who see as home 3 countries: Pakistan, China and America. We send birthday wishes to each other every year ever since we knew each other, now he is happily living with his son and his grandchildren in California.

Me and my friend from France, he studied Chinese medicine in Shanghai and speaks and writes fluent Chinese, I speak Chinese with him all the time because he prefers so. We met again in Shenzhen earlier this year. He is happily married to a Chinese woman and now is a Chinese medicine doctor in Switzerland.

My Early Life in Shenzhen

After the Waterloo of pursuing higher education, I was crushed, emotionally, intellectually and physically thru and thru…until my elder cousin, a mechanical engineer who works in Shenzhen suggested that I could stay in his place and find a job in this city.

Within 2 weeks of job hunting, as a shy nerd, in looking to work as a foreign sales, though academically I stood out among English majors, I was rejected by almost all the interviews in the urban districts of Shenzhen.

But quickly and finally I ended up in a speaker factory, its founder a former Tsinghua graduate(like Harvard or Yale in America) spoke really high of me in personalities and English proficiency and graded me as a talent with high growth potential.

Then with the company I was short term business travelling around the world a few times in HK, Swizerland, the UK and Dubai, a practice that is absolutely seen as too premature for a fresh graduate. Back in China, once upon a time, I met an Indian customer, an educationist as well as a businessman, after his account manager a saleswoman left the company, I was entrusted to follow up all his orders. He might look quite abrupt in this paragraph but, shhh, you will read in the following this gentleman changed my life.

After that, I went to a new job, a Russian smartphone brand company in Shenzhen, I did not stay there too long however because the company decided not to sell smartphones any longer. But I was lucky to work with a couple of people that are 10-30 years older than me and that command decades of accumulated resources in the supply chain of mobile accessories industry.

The old shy me heading to one of my first job interviews, the whole suit except underpants was all from my elder cousin brother.

My ex-boss John and me in a Dubai dessert. We looked like on 2 Brokeback Mountains but please rest assured even the camel confirmed we are the majority.

My first trip abroad- Basel, Switzerland

Me roaming about the London city in the evening

How did I
Start BizShenzhen?

Then I was between jobs. The Indian customer reached out to me to help him with translation in China because he was super impressed by my English in our past encounters, but he needed me more because we had really liked each other ever since we first connected. So I was with him for 2 weeks when I excellently delivered the task not just as a translator but more as his business associate as well as a personal friend.

The Indian customer then suggested to me that I could become a sourcing agent and offered to build a website for me by engaging a friend of his in South India that runs a web design and digital marketing firm. I liked the idea because according to my friend, I could make more money easily than in companies, really simply thinking.

Then I spent weeks in writing the website content and coordinating with the web designer to bring to life the website. Then, BizShenzhen.com was born! In the following 3-4 years, I gradually got a few happy customers, established my Shenzhen company and Hong Kong company, rent an office and hired a few people to work with me.

Because of what I do, I got a lot of opportunities to meet and work with a lot of different interesting people most of whom are super cool and amazing:

In April 2019 my Indian friend flew from the south to the north of India to help me with my business needs and invited me to his house in South India. We were visiting a temple nearby.

A couple-made business owners of an advertising business that gave me the book Outliers as a gift.

A feverish crypto mining guru as well as a highly successful Amazon seller of related hardware products, we spent 2 weeks together in hiking and carrying out business in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We enjoy all day just arguing with each other on China and US politics. I bet we would stay friends lifetime.

A construction material business owner whom I acted like Sherlock Holmes with in getting his phone back after he lost it in a cab.

Two other sourcing agents that you may have easily browsed elsewhere in the internet who are only 2 years older than me. I organized a WeChat group for sourcing agents starting with these 2 fellas and will invite more new members.

Examples are so many and will be many more.

There were terrible people also:

A money launder that speaks Hollywood-class American accent and claimed he owns a super luxury villa like a paradise in Panama( which I later realized is a real paradise for what he is really good at).

Not many of them, but I learned a lot from these people, too. For example, don’t be greedy, or success will be greedy with you.

I love my what I do, and I will keep doing what I do. I love people that I work with and we love each other.

I have other passions as well, one of them is helping adults in China to learn English from scratch. Because in Shenzhen there are just too many expensive English training schools that make people believe the best English teachers are native(and preferably white) English speakers, a marketing gimmick that I highly beg to differ on. I hope to create a tutorial that scientifically empowers adults to study English step by step while not feeling like a parrot but a smart and intelligent adult as they are. But for now, I need to spend major time on my sourcing business and I like to do it.

Another passion is YouTube videos! I have 2 YouTube channels, one for my sourcing business, the other for discussing matters about the differences between China and the west. There hasn’t been a lot of productions as I am busy with most other things and I am not good at editing, but I will definitely spend more time on it in the future as a hobby.

Alright, I am Charlie Lin! I love myself and I like what I do and I love my life.

What’s your personal or business stories like? I’d be all ears 🙂