Notes on getting around China

Travelers in China will need to create a new digital identity because ordering food, navigation, transport and cashless payments require a new set of apps.

This also means that a lot of your personal data will be exposed to Chinese tech companies with no visibility into how it will be used.

Everybody goes looking for the language setting. It is the first instinct, it feels like it must be in there somewhere, and you can lose a genuinely irritating twenty minutes before you accept the truth: there isn't one. Taobao is Chinese, only Chinese, and that is the end of it.

The confusion is understandable. AliExpress is Alibaba too, and AliExpress is in English, so surely. But AliExpress is a different shop with different sellers and different prices pointed at a different continent. It is not Taobao with the labels swapped.

You sit down, you look around for a menu, and there isn't one. There is a small laminated square with a QR code on it, and that is the entire ordering system. The waiter is not ignoring you. The waiter genuinely has nothing to do with this part.

Use WeChat or Alipay to scan, not your phone's camera. The camera will usually fire you into a browser page that half works and then stops. What you want is the mini program, which is an app living inside another app, and which has no language setting whatsoever.

For years the honest answer to "can I pay for things in China as a visitor" was no, not really, bring cash and good luck. That has genuinely changed, and it changed recently enough that a lot of advice online is still wrong.

Alipay and WeChat Pay both take major foreign cards now. Since the country runs on those two apps almost entirely, that one change turns China from awkward into easy.

Here is the mistake, and it is expensive, and people make it constantly. You book a train from Beijing. You go to Beijing station. Your train leaves from Beijing South, which is a completely different building on the other side of a very large city, and you are now watching a taxi meter and a departure time move toward each other.

Chinese cities do not have one station with several entrances. They have several stations, named north, south, east and west, and the compass point is not decoration. Read the station name on the ticket. Then read it again on the morning.

This is the one that can genuinely ruin an evening. You arrive, you hand over your passport, and the person at the desk looks apologetic and says no. Not rudely, not negotiably. They cannot check you in.

It is not about you. Hotels have to register every guest with the police, and plenty of smaller or older properties simply are not set up to file a foreign passport. So they do not take foreign guests, and the booking you made on a site that did not know that is now a problem.

Every foreign visitor in China has to be registered at the address where they are sleeping. It sounds more dramatic than it is. Most people do it without ever knowing, because handing your passport across a hotel desk is the registration.

That is the whole thing. They photograph the passport, they file it, you go upstairs. It is also precisely why a hotel that cannot register foreign guests will not check you in: they are not being awkward, they physically cannot complete the step that makes your stay legal.

People arrive expecting the internet to be slow or broken. It is neither. It is extremely fast, extremely well built, and full of things you have never used, while quietly missing about nine things you use hourly without thinking about them.

Google, entirely. Gmail, Maps, Drive, Translate's online features. Instagram, Facebook, X, WhatsApp.

Chinese map apps are among the best in the world, and this surprises people who expect a compromise. They route across metro, bus, walking and taxi in a single view, they know the inside of shopping centers, they know which station exit you want. The problem is not quality. The problem is that they are in Chinese, and the one you have used your whole life does not load.

Amap or Baidu Maps. Both are excellent. Apple Maps works in China on licensed local data and is a reasonable English-language fallback if you want one, though it knows less about transit.

No ticket machine, no card, no queue. You hold your phone against a scanner and the gate opens. When it works it is the best public transport experience anywhere, and when it does not you are standing in a barrier with a queue forming behind you wondering what you did.

Alipay has a transport code that works in a lot of cities. Most cities also have their own metro app with its own code. Where both work, use whichever. Where only the city app works, the Alipay code gets refused with no explanation at all, and that is the confused thirty seconds.

Chinese hospitals are quick, competent and cheap by Western standards. Almost every problem a visitor has with them is procedural rather than medical: not knowing the order things happen in, and assuming it works like home.

You do not register with a local practice and you do not have a doctor who knows you. For anything routine you go to a hospital outpatient department, choose the relevant specialty yourself, and book a slot.

The scenery is as good as the photographs. The bit the photographs leave out is that these are managed sites with capacity limits, ticket systems and internal bus networks, and that arriving at the bottom of a famous mountain without a booking in August means looking at it from the car park.

Most major scenic areas require a reservation for a specific day, made through a mini program or the site's own app. Popular ones sell out days ahead in summer and around public holidays.

Two things that sound contradictory and are not. A Chinese name is required for absolutely nothing. And most people who stay more than a few weeks end up with one, because it makes ordinary life noticeably smoother.

Anything attached to your identity documents uses your passport name exactly as printed. Visas, flights, train tickets, bank verification, police registration. A Chinese name has no standing in any of that, and using one creates problems rather than solving them.

The thing to understand early is that WeChat is not a messaging app that people also use. It is the layer everything social sits on, and if you are not on it you are not slightly behind, you are absent.

You scan each other's QR code, phone to phone, at the end of a first conversation. Two seconds, no typing, and it replaces both the number and the email address. Find out where your own code lives before somebody asks, because fumbling for it is a small and avoidable embarrassment.

DiDi is how you get a car. Street taxis exist and are harder work, mostly because explaining where you want to go, out loud, to somebody who does not share a language with you, is a worse experience than typing it.

Registration needs an SMS code, and the airport exit at midnight is a spectacularly bad place to learn that. Add a card at the same time. The card form is, inevitably, one of the screens that stays in Chinese.

This is the one that ends trips at the rental desk. Mainland China does not recognize the International Driving Permit. Not "prefers you have something else". Does not recognize it, because China is not party to the convention that created the thing.

So the document you carefully obtained at home, specifically for this, is worth nothing at the counter, and the person telling you so has had this conversation a hundred times.