About

Written from inside China

Into China Guide exists because planning a trip to China from abroad is strangely hard. Official announcements are scattered across embassy websites. Blog posts from 2019 describe a country that no longer works the same way — payment apps, visa rules, even which airport terminal is open have all changed since then. And the apps you'll actually depend on — Alipay, WeChat, DiDi, the railway booking system — are barely documented in English anywhere.

This site is run from Beijing by one person — no agency, no editorial team. The screenshots in our guides come from phones in our hands; the train stations, airports, and payment counters we describe are ones we've stood in. When China's entry policies change — and they've changed fast since 2023, with new countries added to the visa-free list multiple times a year — I read the primary sources in Chinese and update the tools with a visible verification date rather than leaving stale numbers up.

Every page follows the same process: check the primary source first (an official announcement, a station sign, an app's actual UI, a price I paid), write down what it says, and only then turn that into a page. That order matters — it's the difference between a guide that matches reality and one that reads well but quietly guesses. Where something can't be verified directly, the page says so rather than presenting a guess as settled fact.

Who writes this

I'm Mia, and I live in Beijing. I read the visa announcements in the original Chinese, stand in the train-station queues, and pay for the ¥8 breakfast crepes that end up in these guides. Every byline on this site is mine, and every "Verified" date means I went back to the primary source on that day — not that a spreadsheet got refreshed.

I also answer China-travel questions in public, under the same identity, on Reddit,Quora, and Pinterest. If you've seen an answer of mine there, this site is the long-form version of it.

What we publish

• Tools — a visa-free eligibility checker, a 240-hour transit planner, a trip budget calculator, a crowd calendar, a pre-trip checklist builder, and a day-by-day trip planner covering 23 cities. Free, no sign-up, no accounts.
• Guides — step-by-step walkthroughs for setting up Alipay and WeChat Pay, buying train tickets, airport arrivals in five cities, and avoiding common scams, all with real app screens and photos taken on location.
• City & route pages — practical detail (not marketing copy) on 23 cities and 100+ intercity train and flight routes: which station, what it actually costs, how far ahead to book.

How we verify information

Visa and entry policy pages link directly to the official Chinese government sources they're built from — the National Immigration Administration and the China Visa Application Service Center — and carry a "Verified" date. Prices are checked against current listings where noted; where a figure is an estimate rather than a direct check (some intercity fares, for instance), the page says so explicitly rather than presenting a guess as fact. If you catch something that's drifted out of date, that's useful information for us — see below.

Corrections

If you spot something outdated or wrong, please tell us. Entry rules affect real trips, so we treat corrections to visa and policy information as the highest-priority work — see the contact page for response times.

Corrections are published rather than quietly folded in: the corrections log lists what a page used to say, what it says now, and why the change mattered — including the occasions when we removed a claim because we could not evidence it.