This article focuses on communicative language tradition in the language of legal documents. Authors dwell on the analysis of the «verbal communication » term and its understanding in modern science. As evidence, the analysis of this definition in various Russian and Chinese dictionaries is given. In addition, the article mentions the fact that the modern business communication (both Russian and Chinese), on the one hand, is under the influence of western business culture, and on the other hand, preserves communicative traditions of business letter. The authors note that the Chinese communicative tradition is more stable, which is observed in the lexical legislative «word creation». This phenomenon is due to the special way of «borrowing» of new words in Chinese. In addition, the article draws attention to the particular cultural meaning of lexical units of Chinese business documents.