Apps, connectivity and payments
Sort these out before you board. Almost every problem foreign visitors have in their first 24 hours in China comes down to something that should have been installed at home.
Set up and test your payment apps and ride-hailing app while you still have reliable internet and access to your bank's verification messages. Doing it at the airport arrivals hall, on hotel Wi-Fi, with a foreign SIM that cannot receive SMS, is where trips go wrong.
Apps worth having
| App | What it's for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Messaging with suppliers and hosts; mobile payment | Non-negotiable. Your Chinese counterparts will ask for your WeChat ID, not your email. Set it up and add contacts before travelling. | |
| Alipay | Payment, taxis, trains, hotels | The other major wallet; accepts international cards and is often easier for first-time foreign users. |
| DiDi | Ride-hailing | Works with linked international cards; English interface available. Save your destination in Chinese to show drivers. |
| Amap / Baidu Maps | Navigation | Google Maps is unreliable in mainland China. Local apps are far more accurate, especially in industrial zones. |
| Trip.com / Ctrip | Flights, trains, hotels | English-friendly, accepts international cards, and handles domestic rail bookings. |
| Pleco | Dictionary with camera OCR | Invaluable for reading signs, menus and documents. Download the offline pack. |
| A translation app | Conversation and document translation | WeChat has usable built-in translation for chat. Keep a second app for signage and forms. |
| Your airline / hotel apps | Check-in, bookings | You will be asked for booking references constantly. |
Mobile data
Three workable options:
- International roaming — simplest, sometimes expensive, but keeps your home number reachable for banking verifications. Worth keeping on for SMS even if you use a second data source.
- Travel eSIM — buy and install before departure; activates on landing. Convenient and increasingly cheap.
- Local SIM from a Chinese carrier — available at airport counters and city shops with your passport. Cheapest data and gives you a Chinese phone number, which suppliers and hotels will want. Registration with ID is required.
Some overseas websites and apps are not directly reachable in mainland China. Business travellers normally handle this through their company's own compliant cross-border network arrangements, or by relying on the Chinese alternatives listed above. Work this out with your IT department before you travel rather than on arrival.
Paying for things
China is effectively cashless in cities. Plan on mobile payment being the default, with cash as a fallback for taxis, small vendors and the odd emergency.
- Link your international card to Alipay and/or WeChat Pay before you go. Visa and Mastercard are supported; verification may need an SMS to your home number, so do it before you board.
- Carry some RMB cash — a few hundred yuan is plenty for incidentals.
- Keep one physical card for hotel deposits and ATMs. Tell your bank your travel dates so they do not freeze it.
- Watch the fees: some wallet transactions above modest thresholds carry a service fee on international cards, and your bank may add a foreign transaction charge.
Invoices (fapiao) for expenses
If you need to claim expenses, you will hear the word fapiao — China's official tax invoice. It is a regulated document, not a till receipt, and it is what finance departments recognise.
- Ask for the fapiao at the time of payment, not afterwards. Retrospective requests are often refused.
- You will be asked for invoice details: the entity name, and in many cases a tax identification number. Companies with a Chinese entity use their Chinese registration details; visitors without one can usually only obtain an invoice issued to an individual, which may not be acceptable to your finance team — check your internal policy before you travel.
- Hotels, taxis (including via ride-hailing apps) and restaurants can all issue them. Ride-hailing apps let you request one inside the app after the trip.
- Invoice title matters. Get the exact wording your finance team needs, in writing, before your trip.
Getting around
- Metro is the fastest way around most cities and works with wallet QR codes or single-journey tokens. Avoid rush hours (roughly 08:00–09:30 and 17:30–19:00).
- Ride-hailing is cheap and reliable; have your destination written in Chinese, and expect to wait a few minutes at exhibition centres at closing time.
- High-speed rail beats flying for journeys under about five hours. Book through Trip.com or at the station with your passport.
- Intercity tip: for a multi-city trip, group your stops by region — the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta each work well as a cluster.
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