CHINA
🛂 Visa & Passport
Good news if you have a French passport: China introduced visa-free entry for French citizens in 2023. You can stay up to 30 days without a visa for tourism, family visits, or transit.
A few things to know:
- Have your return flight confirmation and first hotel booking on you, not always asked but worth having just in case
- Since November 2025 there’s a digital arrival card to fill in before landing, it replaces the old paper form. You’ll need your first hotel address
- Hotels in China automatically register foreign guests with the local police, it’s standard procedure, nothing to worry about, but it happens at every hotel check-in
- Passport must be valid for at least 6 months beyond your planned departure date
For stays longer than 30 days: you’ll need to apply for a visa at the Centre de Visa pour la Chine (CVASC) in Paris before you leave. You’ll need passport photos, a completed application form, return flights, hotel bookings, proof of financial resources, and travel insurance.
💳 Money – Alipay is Everything
Credit cards (Visa, Mastercard) are not accepted almost anywhere. ATMs often swallow foreign cards (mine at the airport haha). Cash exists but even locals barely use it, everyone pays by phone.
You need Alipay. Set it up before you leave:
- Requires passport biometric verification
- Takes 24-48 hours to activate
- Used for paying, booking Didi, renting bikes, translating, and more
WeChat Pay also works but requires a Chinese resident to sponsor your account, more complicated for tourists.
Check your bank’s fees before leaving and consider a plan with unlimited low-fee transactions, you can easily do ten or more small payments a day.
📱 VPN – Install Before You Leave
Google, Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Maps, all blocked in China. A VPN is not optional, it’s essential.
- Install it before you arrive, it is much harder to set up once you’re there
- NordVPNdidn’t work at all for me
- LetsVPN worked reliably and not expensive, I used it for 4 months all over China
📡 SIM Card & Connectivity
No local Chinese eSIM for foreigners. Two options:
- Buy a travel eSIM before you leave (Nomad, Holafly)
- Pick up a physical SIM card at the airport on arrival, simple and straightforward.
5G coverage is available everywhere, even in smaller cities.
🗣️ Language
Very few people speak English outside major tourist sites. Some signage is in English, for example trains and metro in Shanghai but don’t count on it in smaller cities.
- Google Translate with camera mode is essentialm it translates menus, signs, and anything you point your phone at
- The voice mode is also very useful to communicate in taxis, hotels, or anywhere you need to explain something
- Menus are almost always in Chinese only, but with photos. Point at what you want, specify your protein (beef, pork, chicken), and go for it. Street food is even easier, you see exactly what you’re getting before you order
🚄 Getting Around – Trains & Bookings
Use Trip.com for hotels, domestic flights and high-speed trains. It works like Booking.com and has a Min Voyage section that shows all your reservations in date order.
Important about train tickets: booking in advance puts you in a pre-reservation phase, only confirmed one week before departure. Check the confirmation date. No physical ticket, your passport is your ticket at the gate. Use your full name exactly as on your passport.
High-speed trains are fast, comfortable, and the main way to travel between cities. They reach 300-350 km/h and cover enormous distances in a few hours.
🚕 Getting Around
- 🚲 Bike – rentable via Alipay, great in flat cities like Shanghai and Suzhou
- 🚇 Metro – clean, fast, station names in English. Bag scanners at every entrance
- 📱 Didi (Chinese Uber) – bookable directly in Alipay, enter destination in English. Around €2 per ride, €11 for 25km. If the driver calls, hand your phone to a Chinese person nearby to help you
- 🚕 Taxi – available everywhere but you need your address in Chinese. Trip.com shows addresses in Chinese if you booked your hotel there
🌍 What China Is Actually Like
- Streets are genuinely clean: cleaning teams everywhere, bins on every corner, public toilets in every street, park, and attraction. A stark contrast with Paris
- No graffiti, no homeless people visible, no drug users in the streets. China has some of the strictest drug laws in the world – trafficking over 50 grams of hard drugs can result in the death penalty, and foreign nationals are not exempt
- Very safe. I never felt in danger, not once. Police are present everywhere but without aggression or visible repression. The exception is Tiananmen Square where security is extremely tight – checkpoints, armed police, plainclothes agents. Everywhere else, genuinely safe
- 99% of people you see are Chinese, very few foreign tourists even at major sites. It’s part of what makes China such a cultural shock, you’re not in a tourist bubble, you’re fully immersed.
- Yes sme people occasionally spit in smaller cities, mostly older people. In big cities barely noticeable.
- Couples everywhere, especially in Shanghai, men carry their partner’s bags, very romantic atmosphere around the Bund
- Electric scooters everywhere, completely silent, drivers compensate by honking constantly. Be very careful crossing roads, scooters don’t stop for pedestrians
- Cars are mostly high-end (Porsches, Teslas, Chinese EVs).
- Very few tattoos or piercings
- Very few pets, barely any cats, dogs, or birds
- In the parks, people sing, dance, or play Jianzi – a 2,000-year-old game keeping a large shuttlecock in the air using feet and body. Worth stopping to watch
- Hotels have gas masks in rooms for fire emergencies, not common elsewhere
- Learn to use chopsticks before you go. There are no forks
- Public toilets are everywhere and clean but many are squat toilets
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