Neutral tone plays a crucial role in shaping the Beijing Mandarin accent. Recent studies have revealed varied usage of neutral tone among Beijing speakers, conditioned by various linguistic and social factors. Crucially, its counterpart, full tone appears to be linked to the internationally/outwardly oriented Beijing residents. This study focuses on Beijing local professionals, a group predominantly engaged in interactions within the local marketplace, to investigate the current usage of the neutral tone and its correlation with place orientation. By conducting sociolinguistic interviews with 36 Beijing natives, we found that speakers with a higher orientation towards Beijing use significantly more neutral tone in their speech than those with a lower orientation. This highlights the important role of place identity in neutral tone variation, even for professionals in the local marketplace. We also observe an overall decrease in the use of neutral tone over the past 30 years among local professionals, highlighting the real-time change of this variant in Beijing toward a less locally marked feature—full tone. These findings confirm previous findings which suggest that place orientation is a significant driver of local dialect maintenance/death. It also demonstrates how orientation functions throughout the community. For Beijing, we see that place orientation has shifted from being a conditioning factor between international and local marketplaces, to being a conditioning factor within the local marketplace.