Preface
Rob and I have were just traveling in China for a little bit. It was Rob's first time there, and it was a really fantastic time. He's been posting a ton about the more "interesting" stuff: things we saw, places we went, food we ate, and so on. But a whole lot of work went into making the trip run smoothly under the hood, so I wanted to write about all of that specifically, in the hopes that it might help other international travelers to China.
A few disclaimers first. China is an absolutely massive country, and we only went to Beijing and Shenyang this time around, so this will be one very specific set of data points. Furthermore, China changes quite a bit every single time I visit (although I also believe the rate of change is now decreasing), so what is true here may no longer be true in a year. I am also fluent enough in Mandarin Chinese to understand the majority of the writing I see, and also to speak with your average Chinese citizen in a language they're comfortable with, so there's a lot less friction for me there. Nevertheless, I think a lot of what we had to deal with will be useful to others.
I'd also like to make a bit of a philosophical aside. This post is targeted at people who prefer a more DIY approach to travel. There is a world where you can hire a travel agency to do the vast majority of things for you: figure out what you need enter China, transport you around, take you to restaurants and order all the dishes for you, handle all the payments, and so on. This is a great way for some people to travel, and if this is how you want to travel to China as well, then this post is not for you.
One of the things I enjoy most about traveling to a place is gaining insight into how your average person there lives. It's often extremely different from my own little bubble, and I just find it fascinating that people are so adaptable to so many different ways of living. For me, one way to see more of this is to try to figure out more of the day-to-day logistics of what it takes to simply exist somewhere.
So, all that said: if you want to travel in China, you have to accept that traveling in China is not easy. I think it's one of the more challenging countries to travel in, and I say this as a native Chinese speaker who grew up coming here yearly. It requires a lot more planning and preparation than most destinations on your typical Western traveler's radar. Traveling here isn't easy, but the more effort you put into figuring out how to do various things yourself, the more you will summarily be rewarded with the freedom to navigate the country in a way that ultimately lets you experience it much more deeply.
Before You Arrive
Possibly Get a Visa
If you're like me and Rob, and traveling to China as a US citizen, it's up to you whether or not you want to obtain an official visa beforehand. There is a fairly specific set of circumstances under which you can travel to China without getting a visa beforehand, which I won't get into here.
Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward to obtain a visa yourself if you live near a consulate. The entire application is online these days, and I found that if you accidentally messed something up on any given page of the application, it wouldn't let you proceed until you fixed it. That is to say, if you get through the application then you probably did it right. Anecdotally I had read that for tourist visas, you could get up to 10 years, with each visit being up to 90 days at a time. These were the values I entered for Rob's application, and they granted it to him. I have a different kind of visa since I have family in China.
We applied through the NYC consulate, and it took 5 calendar days from submission until the next step, which is physically dropping the passport off at the consulate. After we did that, we came back another week later for pickup, and that was that.
Set up Payments
This one is vital, and if you don't do this, then the start of your China travel will be extremely rough. China operates almost entirely on virtual payments, and using cash is exceedingly rare. I set us up with two virtual payment apps each: Alipay and WeChat. Having these two apps will suffice.
Alipay is probably the one with the lower barrier to entry. It's pretty easy to download it, sign up, and add a credit card for payments (ideally with no foreign transaction fee). I also find Alipay's interface a little more intuitive than WeChat's.
WeChat is a more annoying, because if you don't have it already then you need somebody to invite you to be able to sign up at all. Once you get past this hurdle, it's more or less the same process as Alipay to get a credit card set up properly for payments.
A few years ago I found that all vendors took WeChat but some didn't take Alipay. This time, every vendor in Beijing and Shenyang accepted Alipay. So it's possible that China is at a point where you only need one of these two apps, not both. I preferred to have both set up just in case.
I signed up with a Chase card and it worked without a hitch in China. Rob set them up with both an Amex and Capital One card. In China, the Capital One card gave him grief and refused to verify the payments despite putting in a travel notice beforehand, but Amex worked perfectly.
For both of these, you can test out payments at testchinapay.com well ahead of time to see if you have it set up properly. I don't know what brilliant person set this up and is getting a steady stream of 1 yuan payments every day, but I think it was worth it to spend all of 50 cents total to verify that we both had payments set up properly in both apps.
Book High-Speed Trains
China's high-speed rail system is, by far, the best way to travel between cities. It's much less of a hassle than flying: most airports are far out of the city center, whereas train stations are more centrally located. You also only have to show up maybe 30 minutes in advance, so a lot of time is saved all around. Even in 2nd class (the cheapest option), the seats are extremely spacious and comfortable.
The main issue is that you can't book tickets more than 14 days in advance. This means that if you're traveling during a busy time period, you have to be on top of booking the tickets you need as they get released each day. If you look up train itineraries on trip.com in the future, it'll tell you the exact date and time (in China Standard Time) that the tickets will be released. Based on those times, I set calendar reminders.
If you're not traveling during a busy period, you can likely use trip.com's advance booking feature to get the tickets you need. However, we happened to be there the week of May 1, which is a major national holiday week and also apparently the first week ever that kids had spring break, so I didn't want to take any chances. I used the 12306 app, which is the railway's official app. You can use it in English, register on it with your passport, and book tickets directly through it. I was on the app the moment the tickets got released, which unfortunately included 12AM and 5AM in my local time. This turned out to be the right move in our particular case: the trains we needed to book sold out within minutes and even seconds. I was glad to be on the official app instead of having to go through a middleman.
One minor note: the English-language setting on the app will let you book tickets successfully, but the Chinese version has marginally more functionality. On the Chinese version, I was able to specifically book the 2-seat side of the row (instead of the 3-seat side); when the language is set to English, this is not possible.
Book Museums
It's possible that this one is specific to Beijing, but for the major tourist attractions we wanted to visit, we had to purchase a tickets a week in advance, since some of them are notorious for selling out as well. Again, since we were there during a major holiday week, I didn't want to take any chances.
My advice would be to find the official website of each attraction you want to visit (I did this through the external links section of any given attraction's Wikipedia page), and see what the ticket booking system is on their website. Some will direct you to that attraction's page on trip.com. Others have their own system, on which you can pre-register with your passport info, and then be ready to book the tickets when they get released a week in advance.
I pre-booked tickets to the Forbidden City, the National Museum of China, Badaling, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven. Out of all of these, it was really only the first two that I was particularly stressed out about. The Forbidden City sold out in around an hour, and the National Museum of China sold out within minutes.
Purchase a Data Plan
China has its Great Firewall, meaning that you cannot access many websites like Google services within the country. While you can use a VPN to get around it, there is an easier way if you have a modern phone that can use eSIMs. Many eSIMs for China will bypass the Great Firewall because they will route blocked websites outside of the country.
We used an option on trip.com. We bought the 3GB per day package, installed the eSIM the day before we left, and then upon landing, it immediately started working. We had service everywhere we went, and I had no issues whatsoever accessing apps like Gmail and Instagram for the entire time.
With the particular eSIM we had, we weren't able to use the mobile hotspots on our phones so that our laptops could access the unrestricted internet as well, but we got around this by physically connecting our phones to our laptops so that our laptops had internet access through the wired connections.
Download Other Apps
- Amap: I think this is probably the best map app for English speakers, because it integrates well into cities' public transit systems, and also has a decent English-language version.
- Trip.com: useful if you've booked any tickets through it.
- 12306: verify your train info, and see what track you need to be at.
- Meituan: this is an app centered around food and restaurants. In a few of the restaurants we went to, we had to order through this app.
While in China
Public Transit within a City
Chances are that if you've set up Alipay properly, then that's the app you'll be able to use to use any given city's public transit, by clicking on the "Transport" button at the top and setting up a transit card. We did this on the spot in Shenyang at the subway gate, and it worked fine.
On the Beijing subway system, it's a bit easier for Westerners: you can tap to pay at the gate with a credit card or your phone.
Yes, every subway station has security. It is what it is. My goal here isn't to complain about it; it's just to inform you that it is there and you'll have to deal with it.
At no point within Beijing or Shenyang did we ever have to stop at any sort of ticket vending machine for any reason.
Taxis within a City
Use Didi, which is just Uber but in China. If you've set up Alipay, it's in the app there already, it's in English, and it's very well-integrated with Alipay payments. I found it very intuitive to use.
Old-school taxis are also still plentiful and easy to hail on the street. You know a taxi is empty if its sign in front (which says "空车" and means "empty car") is lit up.
Trains between Cities
As mentioned before, if you show up at the train station half an hour in advance, that's plenty of time to comfortably get through security, grab something at the convenience store, and board your train. There's really no rush to get onto your train as fast as possible, if you've booked a train with assigned seating.
When in line for boarding, you don't need any sort of separate paper ticket. Your passport number is linked to your ticket in their systems, so your passport is your ticket. Just make sure to get in a line with a person standing there, instead of the automated line. Sometimes the automated lines only accepted the national Chinese ID, and we had to switch over. Flash your passport at the person and they'll know what to do.
Eating
The experience of arriving at a restaurant, ordering food, and paying is frustratingly inconsistent. It seems way more complicated than it needs to be, but again, my goal here is to just tell you about the situation as it is, and not complain. If it's a more official sit-down restaurant, then you'll likely have to scan a QR code with any one of your apps (Meituan, WeChat, or Alipay) to see the menu and order. Sometimes, we found that the staff recognized that we didn't understand the system, and they provided us with a physical menu and were able to take our orders verbally, which was great, but this isn't guaranteed.
Paying for Things
There are also more options here than there should be. When the time to pay for something comes, if they point you at a QR code to scan, then scan it and enter the amount you owe. If there's some sort of tap-to-pay device, we learned to open up Alipay and tap your phone against it. If they have some sort of device with a square opening to scan a QR code, then open up your payment QR code and scan it.
We ran into a fair amount of confusion here at first. We found that patience for our confusion was universal, and that the staff of any given establishment was graceful in explaining how to pay if we didn't get it. I get the sense that foreigners aren't the only people confused about the inconsistent experience.
Haggling
Haggling for non-food goods that you want to buy is still very much a thing. I've never particularly enjoyed it, but Chinese vendors are used to it (and indeed probably even expect it), so just do it. If you aren't fluent in counting in Mandarin, use your phone's calculator to show numbers to make it easier. If you're not sure if you can haggle or not, then give it a shot; the worst thing that happens is they say that they can't haggle here, and you move on.