Paying for things in China, and getting your phone to work

This article is what we send people who want to understand the problem rather than just follow the instructions. The instructions themselves, with screenshots, go out with your booking documents.

What actually happened to money in China

China moved from cash to phone payment in about six years and largely skipped the credit card. That is not an exaggeration about the pace. A country where everyone carried notes in 2013 was, by around 2019, one where a fruit seller with a cardboard box and a laminated QR code had no interest in your fifty yuan note.

What that means in practice:

• International cards work at the airport, in international hotel chains, in some department stores and in a shrinking number of restaurants that cater to visitors.
• Almost everywhere else the transaction is a QR code. The noodle shop, the temple ticket window, the taxi, the bicycle share, the vending machine on the train platform, the woman selling roast sweet potatoes outside the station.
• Cash is still legal tender and you should carry a few hundred yuan. You will also meet vendors who have no change for a large note and, occasionally, vendors who wave you away rather than deal with paper at all.

None of this is hostile to visitors. It is simply a country that has moved on and has not thought much about the fifty people a day who arrive from somewhere that did not.

The fix, which has to happen before you travel

Alipay and WeChat Pay both accept international cards from foreign visitors, and both work well once linked. The set-up is not difficult. It is close to impossible to do in a taxi queue at Beijing Capital at eleven at night, which is when most people first try.

What we do:

1. At the booking stage we send you a written walkthrough with screenshots for whichever app suits your phone and your card, and we tell you which of your cards is most likely to link cleanly.
2. You set it up at home, in your own time, and you test it by making a small payment.
3. Our partner team checks it works on your first morning in China, before you leave the hotel for the first time, because that is the day it matters.

Two practical notes. Link a card you are happy to leave linked for the trip, because relinking from inside China is more awkward than doing it at home. And keep a small amount of cash for temple donations, rural buses and the occasional stall that only takes notes.

Connectivity, and what we do about it

Several of the services you use every day are not reachable from a local Chinese connection. That includes some of the mapping, search and messaging tools most travellers assume will simply be there.

The fix is the same shape as the payment fix: do it before you fly, and test it.

We install and test a VPN on your phone with you at the booking stage. Because that is done and checked before departure, your usual apps behave in China the way they behave at home. In practice this is why our travellers keep using the tools they already know rather than learning a new set on arrival.

It also means your travel group runs on WhatsApp exactly as it does everywhere else we operate: your consultant here, our partner team there, opened before you leave and closed when you are home. If you would rather have a local fallback we open a WeChat group alongside it, and on the day a train is cancelled you will be glad of both.

What we ask you to do beyond that is short:

• Download an offline map of each city you are visiting before you fly.
• Download the offline language pack for your translation app. It handles menus, taxi destinations and pharmacy conversations, and it does it without a connection.
• Keep a screenshot of your hotel address in Chinese characters for each night. Drivers read characters, not romanised spellings.

The rest of the first-timer’s list

Payments and phones are the two that surprise people. These are the others we brief every first-time traveller on, and none of them is difficult once you know.

Your passport runs your trip. You need it to buy a rail ticket, to board a train, to check in at a hotel and to enter many sites. Carry the physical passport, not a photograph of it. This is the single most common cause of a missed train among independent travellers.

Hotels must be licensed to take foreign guests. Not all of them are, particularly in small towns. It is why we do not book the cheapest room on a booking site and hope.

The language barrier is real and manageable. Rail stations and airports are bilingual, translation apps handle menus and taxis, and hotel staff in cities speak some English. In rural Guizhou or western Sichuan, English is essentially absent, which is precisely where we put a guide.

Taxis are cheap and easy once your payment app works, because the ride-hailing function sits inside the same app. Hailing on the street works too, and paying is the same QR code.

Tipping is not the custom and can cause confusion. Guides and drivers on a private trip are the exception, and we tell you what is normal.

Queueing is a contact sport at ticket windows and on metro platforms. It is not rudeness and it is not aimed at you.

Bring the medicine you rely on in its original packaging with the prescription. Pharmacies are good and widespread, and matching a brand name across languages in a hurry is not fun.

Why this matters more in China than elsewhere

In most of Asia, a traveller who arrives unprepared muddles through with cash and gestures and loses an hour. In China, a traveller who arrives unprepared cannot buy a bottle of water at a station kiosk, cannot pay for a taxi and cannot book anything through their phone, and the fix takes a day.

That is the whole of the problem, and it is why we treat it as part of the booking rather than as a tip at the end of a document. It is also why we say plainly on every China page that our own offices are in Japan, Vietnam, India and the Philippines, and that China runs through long-standing partner teams in Beijing, Chengdu and Kunming. Those teams are the people who check your phone on the first morning.

Once it is done, China is one of the easiest countries in Asia to move around. The rail is superb, the cities are safe at any hour, the food is cheap and the systems work. You just have to be inside them.

Plan this trip

Tell us your dates and the shape of trip you have in mind, and Asaf will build you a first outline. The payment and connectivity set-up is part of every China booking we take, not an extra.

Start planning

Keep reading

• China: the complete guide to planning your trip
• How Chinese high-speed rail actually works
• What two weeks in China really costs
• What we would skip in China
• Classic China in 12 days
• All our China trips

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