About China Lens Guide
Practical China travel advice from people who actually live here.
Who we are
China Lens Guide is run by an international community of people living in China — students, remote workers, and long-term residents from different countries who navigate daily life here: paying with our phones, booking high-speed trains, keeping our home apps working, and exploring the country on weekends.
We are not a travel agency and we do not sell tours. We write the guides we wish we had found before we arrived.
Our mission
Give foreign visitors practical, current, first-hand information for traveling in China. Most advice online is outdated or written by people who have never dealt with the reality on the ground. We focus on the things that actually decide whether your trip goes smoothly:
- Connectivity — VPNs, SIM cards, and eSIMs, so you stay online from the moment you land.
- Payments — setting up WeChat Pay and Alipay as a foreigner, because cash rarely works anymore.
- Transport — metro, DiDi, and high-speed rail, without needing to read Chinese.
- Destinations — honest takes on where to go, from major cities to places like Zhangjiajie.
How we work
Things change fast in China — payment app rules, visa policies, which services work for foreigners. So every guide is dated, and we update guides as policies change rather than letting them quietly go stale. If a guide says “Updated” with a recent date, that means someone checked it against reality.
Our guides are based on first-hand experience on the ground: the apps we use daily, the stations we get lost in, the setups we help newly arrived friends through. When something stops working, we notice — because we live with it too.
Reader-supported
China Lens Guide is free to read and reader-supported. There is no paywall and no registration. In the future, some links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you — see our affiliate disclosure for exactly how that works. You can also read our privacy policy to see how little data we collect.