China has quietly become one of the easiest big countries to visit and one of the hardest to arrive in unprepared. The visa question got simpler. The everyday mechanics, paying for things, hailing a car, reading a menu, getting online, all changed in ways that nothing in your habits prepares you for. Sort those out before you fly and the trip is straightforward.
Visas
The rules improved substantially in the last two years, and they differ by passport in ways worth being precise about.
| Passport | What you need | | --- | --- | | Armenia | Nothing. 90 days within any 180, under the mutual visa waiver. | | Georgia | Nothing. 30 days per entry, up to 90 within any 180. | | Russia | Nothing. 30 days, under a trial extended in May 2026 and running to 31 December 2027. | | EU and Schengen | Mostly nothing, 30 days, under the unilateral visa-free scheme. | | United States | Visa required, or 240-hour transit. |
Armenian citizens have the best deal here: a full mutual waiver of 90 days in 180, which is better than the 30-day unilateral arrangement most European nationalities get.
There is also a 240-hour visa-free transit, ten days, available at more than sixty ports of entry to over fifty nationalities. The catch that trips people up: it is genuinely a transit. You must be continuing to a different country or region from the one you arrived from. Flying Yerevan to Shanghai and back to Yerevan does not qualify. Yerevan to Shanghai to Bangkok does.
Passports need six months validity. Hotels register your stay with the police automatically, but only hotels licensed to take foreign guests, which is why some cheap listings will turn you away at the desk.
Paying for things, which is the real problem
China skipped cards and went straight to phones. Cash is legal and increasingly awkward. Small vendors may not have change, and some staff genuinely have not handled notes in months.
Set up Alipay or WeChat Pay before you fly. Both now accept international Visa and Mastercard, and Alipay also takes Amex. You link the card and verify with your passport inside the app. Do this at home, on your home internet, because doing it for the first time on Chinese networks with a verification SMS you cannot receive is a bad afternoon.
Transactions under 200 yuan carry no cross-border platform fee, which covers most of what you will spend day to day.
Physical foreign cards work by direct swipe only in four and five star hotels and upmarket malls. Do not plan around them.
Carry a few hundred yuan in cash as backup for temples, small rural stops and taxis in smaller cities.
The internet, and why your phone matters here
Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail and most Western news sites are blocked on Chinese networks. What works without any workaround: WeChat, Alipay, Baidu, Bing, Apple iMessage and FaceTime, and the Chinese apps you will actually need, Didi for rides and Meituan for food.
There are two ways around it and they are not equal.
A VPN is the familiar answer. Chinese law prohibits unauthorised VPN use for cross-border connections, enforcement against tourists browsing casually is very rare, but VPN apps are not downloadable from inside China, so it has to be installed and paid for before you arrive, and the reliable ones get blocked and unblocked in waves.
The cleaner answer is a roaming eSIM. Because the traffic routes through the operator's home network rather than through a Chinese one, the firewall does not apply to it in the same way, and Google Maps, WhatsApp and everything else simply work. No VPN, no app store problem, no subscription that stops working in week two. Install it before you leave, since you cannot easily buy one once you are inside and blocked from the app store you would buy it in.
A local Chinese SIM has the opposite effect: it is cheap, requires your passport, and puts you fully behind the firewall.
When to go
April to May, and September to October. Those two windows are the whole answer for most of the country.
Summer is hot and wet almost everywhere, and the Yangtze cities, Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanjing, are genuinely punishing in July and August. It is also domestic holiday season, which means the Great Wall and the Forbidden City at capacity.
Winter in the north is very cold and, in some cities, has poor air quality. Winter in the south, Yunnan, Guangdong, Hong Kong, is pleasant.
Avoid the two national holidays entirely if you can. Chinese New Year, which moves between late January and February, and National Day week starting 1 October, are the largest human migrations on earth. Trains sell out weeks ahead and every site is full.
Getting around
The high-speed rail network is the best in the world and it is the reason not to fly domestically. Beijing to Shanghai is four and a half hours, city centre to city centre. Tickets are bought through the 12306 app or at the station and are tied to your passport, which you show to board. Book a few days ahead for popular routes.
Book second class. It is comfortable, and business class costs several times more for a slightly wider seat.
In cities, use Didi. It has an English interface and it removes the language problem entirely, which street taxis do not. Metro systems are excellent, signed in English, and cheap.
Download an offline map and a translation app with camera translation before you go. Pointing a phone at a menu and reading it is not a luxury here, it is how you order.
What things cost
China is mid-priced now, not cheap, and Shanghai and Beijing cost roughly what southern Europe does.
- Hostel bed: 80 to 150 yuan
- Mid-range hotel: 350 to 700 yuan
- Street food or noodle shop meal: 15 to 40 yuan
- Proper restaurant dinner: 100 to 250 yuan a person
- Metro ride: 3 to 8 yuan
- High-speed train, Beijing to Shanghai, second class: around 550 yuan
- Forbidden City entry: 60 yuan, and it must be booked online in advance
- Great Wall at Mutianyu: entry plus cable car, around 200 yuan all in
Book the Forbidden City online days ahead. Walk-up tickets do not exist and the daily cap is real.
Tipping is not done. Not in restaurants, not in taxis, not for hotel staff. Leaving money can cause confusion rather than pleasure.
Etiquette and practicalities
Queueing norms differ, and pushing on a metro is not aggression. Volume in restaurants is high. Neither is rudeness.
Tap water is not drinkable anywhere. Hotels provide kettles and every train has boiling water taps, which is why everyone carries a flask.
Public toilets are frequently squat toilets and frequently have no paper. Carry tissues. This is the single most common unforced error visitors make.
Smoking rules are enforced unevenly outside the big cities.
Photographing military sites, police and some government buildings is a real problem rather than a faux pas.
Safety
China is extremely safe for tourists in terms of crime. Violent crime against foreigners is very rare and walking anywhere at night is normal, including for solo women.
The genuine risks are traffic, which is fast and does not concede to pedestrians the way you may expect, and scams. The main one is the tea house scam in Beijing and Shanghai: friendly English speakers approach you near a tourist site, invite you to a tea ceremony or an art student exhibition, and the bill is enormous. The rule is simple. Do not follow strangers who approach you first.
Air quality in northern cities in winter is worth checking on an app if you are asthmatic.
Where to go
Beijing is four days: the Forbidden City, the Great Wall at Mutianyu rather than Badaling, the Temple of Heaven and a hutong neighbourhood.
Xi'an for the Terracotta Army and the best street food in the country, in the Muslim Quarter. Two days.
Shanghai is the modern counterweight, three days, and the old French Concession is where to walk.
Chengdu for pandas, hotpot and a slower pace, and as the gateway to the Tibetan plateau edge.
Guilin and Yangshuo for the karst landscape that appears on the 20 yuan note.
Yunnan, meaning Kunming, Dali and Lijiang, is the trip for a second visit and is a different country culturally.
If China is part of a wider Asian route, the Japan guide covers the neighbour most often paired with it, and the UAE guide covers the usual connecting hub from this region.
Questions people actually ask
Do Armenian citizens need a visa for China? No. 90 days within any 180, under the mutual visa waiver. That is more generous than what most European passports get.
What is the 240-hour transit and does it apply to me? Ten days visa-free if you are genuinely transiting to a third country. Arriving from and returning to the same country does not qualify.
Will WhatsApp and Google work? Not on a Chinese network. A roaming eSIM routes around the block without a VPN, which is the simplest fix and has to be arranged before you arrive.
Can I pay with cash? Legally yes, practically it is awkward. Set up Alipay or WeChat Pay with an international card before you fly.
Do I tip? No. Nowhere.
Is the Great Wall crowded? Badaling is. Mutianyu, an hour further out, is not, and it has a cable car and a toboggan back down.
