GUANGZHOU, CHINA — Buyers from around the world thronged the cavernous halls of the Canton Fair at its opening day Monday, as a new and somewhat more optimistic mood seemed to be taking hold among Chinese exporters, despite signs that the possible beginning of any economic recovery in China seems narrowly based and may not last.

With only a few exceptions, exporters of products as varied as hammers, electric fans and gaudy nightclub wall decorations said that demand from emerging markets and the United States was beginning to recover.

“It’s getting better,” said Zhang Lu, the sales manager of Ningbo Dabu Welding Technology, which sells welding helmets with heavily tinted safety visors and designs on the sides that include flaming skulls and American eagles.

China’s credit crunch also appears to be easing. Chen Wenfei, the assistant general manager of Jiangmen Ruirong Pump Industry, said that a recent bank loan for the purchase of factory equipment together with rising export orders had allowed the company to hire 30 more workers, bringing the total to 330.

The loan process “was very fast — we are an existing customer, and they increased our credit line,” said Mr. Chen, whose company exports water well pumps to the Mideast and North Africa.

Yet domestic demand inside China is still flat, executives from provinces across China cautioned in interviews. Many companies still have sizable inventories of unsold goods. And while Chinese exports to many markets have been surprisingly strong this autumn, sales to Europe are still falling, with no end in sight.

In the latest sign of chronic overcapacity, wholesale prices were down 3.6 percent last month from the level of a year ago, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced Monday. Prices are still rising at the consumer level but at an ever slower pace, up 1.9 percent last month from a year ago.

The mood at the Canton Fair, the country’s main export fair with nearly 60,000 exhibition stalls, has nonetheless improved strikingly from the previous session of the twice-a-year event, last held in April.

The Chinese government announced Saturday that exports had grown 9.9 percent last month, almost twice as fast as most forecasts, while a broad measure of the money supply also increased faster than expected.

The nascent economic recovery seems not to depend on a sustainable revival of consumer spending within China. Instead, it appears heavily dependent on exports — which may cause further job losses in struggling overseas economies and could also result in increased calls from politicians like Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, for more confrontational trade and currency policies toward China.

The early signs of an improvement in the economy are also underpinned by investment spending, largely financed by a potentially inflationary surge in loans from state-owned banks to government construction projects.

“It seems that while people are searching for signs of China’s consumption taking the lead, it is the good old exports and investment that might lead the recovery again, at least in the short term,” Wang Tao, a China economist at UBS, wrote in a research note Monday.

Many economists expect the Chinese government to announce Thursday that economic growth in the third quarter was just barely short of the official target of 7.5 percent. But business executives said that the reality was worse for many companies selling in the domestic market, leaving considerable room for a rebound.

“All industries are going down, but why aren’t the official statistics going down?” asked Bob Wang, the sales manager of Kralle Tools, a manufacturer in the eastern city of Wenzhou that makes circular saw blades for lumber mills.

He said that he believed government officials had been underestimating the extent of China’s slowdown to avoid losing face.

With real estate markets in much of the world still weak, Chinese exporters of construction products are less bullish than exporters of other goods.

“This year’s business is worse than last year’s,” said Renee Wong, the export manager of Heng Feng Aluminum, which is based in the southern city of Foshan and exports aluminum window frames to Africa, Australia and Poland. “It’s a hangover from the global financial crisis.”

U.S. buyers nonetheless appeared to be more numerous than usual at the Canton Fair on Monday, with many catching the first two-hour morning train from Hong Kong. Demand from commodity-exporting countries and highly populous nations has also been unexpectedly robust.

“Australia is steady, India is strong — Europe is slowly falling asleep,” said Marlies Janssen, the Dutch chief executive of Retail D’sign Factory, a design and purchasing company based in Shanghai that specializes in vacuum cleaners and kitchen blenders.

But Japanese buyers were conspicuous by their near absence from the fair, a consequence of a territorial dispute over seven uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that set off anti-Japanese demonstrations in many Chinese cities, with dozens of Japanese cars destroyed.

Chinese exports have benefited partly from a halt to the appreciation of the renminbi against the dollar this year.

The Chinese currency has bobbed up and down around 6.3 to the dollar, even weakening by 1 percent for a while over the summer.

Investors have been taking money out of China as the real estate market has weakened and the prospects for appreciation have faded, offsetting the continued inflows from the country’s persistent trade surpluses.

The product that seemed to draw the biggest crowds at the Canton Fair was one of potentially dubious legality. It was the “stealth license plate,” a remote-controlled electric frame for car license plates that can slide a black cover over the plate in two seconds to prevent the plate from being identified by automatic cameras at toll plazas or police speed traps.

Two lights in a plug-in dashboard display indicate whether the front and rear license plates are visible or not.

A saleswoman for the company, Zhejiang Hongxu Industrial in Yongkang City, China, said that the devices could not be sold in China but were being exported to the United States, Russia and Kazakhstan.

She went silent when her manager loudly ordered her not to discuss the product with any journalists.