Whatever brings you to China, someone local to help.

Alipay is the single most useful app for a visitor to China. With your passport and a foreign card, you can pay for almost anything — street food, taxis, metro, museums, malls — straight from your phone. No Chinese bank account needed. Set it up at home a few days before you fly, not at the airport: if your bank blocks the card, you will need time to call them.

• A valid passport (the name must match your card exactly)
• A Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, Discover, Diners Club or international UnionPay card (a UnionPay card avoids the 3% fee entirely)
• Your home-country phone number (for the bank's SMS verification code)
• A stable internet connection

1. Download Alipay and sign up
   Install Alipay from the App Store, tap Sign Up, and register with your international phone number. Keep your home SIM active — you will need it for SMS codes. The interface is fully available in English in 2026.
   Alipay
2. Switch the app to English (if needed)
   If it opens in Chinese: Me → Settings → Language → English.
3. Verify your identity with your passport (do this first)
   Required before you can link any card — an unverified account cannot bind a card or pay. Go to Me → Settings → Account & Security → Identity Verification. Scan your passport and take a selfie; approval is usually automatic within minutes. Enter your name exactly as printed in the machine-readable zone at the bottom of your passport — surname first, then given names.
4. Add your card
   Me → Bank Cards → Add Card. No Chinese bank account needed. The cardholder name must match your verified passport name exactly, including middle names and hyphens.
5. Set a 6-digit payment password
   You'll create a 6-digit PIN used for every payment. Memorize it.
6. Make your first payment a small one
   You cannot test a Chinese merchant payment from home, so make your first real payment in China a small one at a staffed shop — a bottle of water at a convenience store — where someone can help if it fails. Avoid making your first attempt at a metro turnstile or in a taxi. To pay: tap Pay/Scan, then scan the merchant QR code or show them yours.

• Limits: up to ¥35,000 (~US$5,000) per transaction once verified; annual ¥50,000–¥500,000 by verification level. Before verification you are capped at roughly ¥3,500 per transaction. (Old guides saying ¥5,000 are outdated.)
• Fees: payments over ¥200 carry about 3%; ¥200 or under is free. An international UnionPay card is exempt from this fee entirely. Your home bank may add a 1–3% foreign-transaction fee. No-FX-fee cards (Wise, Revolut, Schwab) save money on longer trips.
• If your card is rejected: turn off any VPN while linking. If your bank blocked the ¥0.01 verification charge, call them and say "Alipay" by name. If you see a name-mismatch error, re-enter your name exactly as it appears in your passport machine-readable zone.
• No card or card won’t work? Major airports have cash top-up counters — show your passport, hand over CNY cash, and staff credit your Alipay balance.
• Refunds go back to the original card in CNY (3–10 business days); the amount may differ slightly due to exchange-rate movement.
• Metro and buses: Alipay works at the gate in most cities, but each city transport network needs a one-time activation inside the app before your QR code will open the turnstile.

DiDi is China’s Uber — it runs in 400+ cities, has a full English interface, accepts international Visa/Mastercard, and doesn’t need a Chinese phone number. In most cities it’s the fastest, safest way to get around, with built-in driver-chat translation.

1. Use DiDi inside Alipay or WeChat — no download needed
   DiDi runs as a mini-program inside both Alipay and WeChat. Open Alipay, tap Transport or search for DiDi, and you are ready to book — it bills your linked card and has an English interface. There is no separate English DiDi app for travel inside China: the standalone 滴滴 app is Chinese-only, and the app called DiDi International is for hailing rides outside China. If you read Chinese you can use 滴滴 directly, but for everyone else the mini-program is the route.
2. Open it once at home, not at the curb
   Run through the first-use prompts before you fly: the mini-program will ask permission to use your host account, and may ask you to confirm your phone number with an SMS code. There is no separate DiDi sign-up to complete. Do it while your home SIM still receives messages and your connection is reliable — you want to find a problem on your sofa rather than at a curb in Shanghai.
3. Payment is whatever the host app already uses
   There is nothing extra to add: the mini-program charges through its host, so the Alipay one bills your Alipay-linked card and the WeChat one bills WeChat Pay. Each can only use its own host's payment method — which is exactly why having both Alipay and WeChat set up gives you a fallback if one card gets declined.
4. Book a ride
   Type your destination in English ('The Bund') or paste the Chinese address for accuracy. Check the estimate, confirm, and match the license plate before getting in.

• Two ways to book, both needing no download: the DiDi mini-program inside Alipay, or the one inside WeChat. Set up at least one before you fly and you have the other as a fallback — each pays through its own host app, so if a card is declined in one, try the other.
• In big malls/complexes, drop the pin on the main entrance gate and add a note, or the driver may not find you.
• Safety features built in: trip sharing, emergency contact, one-tap 110 police alarm, number privacy.
• Ride types: Express (budget, the default), Premier (comfort), Taxi.

Xiaohongshu (also called RedNote / Little Red Book) is China’s Instagram + Pinterest + TripAdvisor in one — 300M+ monthly users sharing photo/video notes on food, travel and lifestyle. Search "Shanghai hidden gems" or "Chengdu itinerary" and you get recent, first-hand local recommendations that beat anything on Google. It works on any local connection and has a growing English-speaking community.

1. Download
   Search "Xiaohongshu" or "RedNote" (red icon with a white book) on the App Store. The international and Chinese versions are the same app, sharing the same content and accounts, and it works on any local connection.
   RedNote
2. Sign up
   Use your international phone number with country code, or an Apple ID. Some countries' numbers see SMS delays. If sign-up keeps failing, turn off any VPN, force-close and reopen the app, try a different sign-up method, or switch WiFi — it is almost always a temporary security flag rather than a block.
3. Set the interface to English
   Profile (bottom right) → Settings (gear icon, top right) → General → Language → English. Menu labels vary a little between app versions, so if you do not see General, look for a language or translation entry in Settings.
4. Turn on automatic content translation — this is the one to find
   Separate from the interface language, there is a setting that translates the posts themselves into English. If you downloaded the app outside mainland China you may be offered it on first login; if you skipped that prompt, it lives alongside the language setting. This is what turns a feed of Chinese text into something you can actually read, so it is worth hunting for.
5. Search for recommendations
   By keyword (English or Chinese): try 'Beijing hutong food', 'best coffee Shanghai', a neighborhood name, or an attraction.
6. Read real reviews before you go
   Look for 避雷笔记 ('avoid-the-trap' warning posts) to skip places that aren't worth it.

• The Nearby (附近) tab surfaces spots around your current location — great for spontaneous discovery.
• Screenshot a place’s Chinese name from a post, then paste it into Amap/DiDi to navigate there.
• It’s a discovery tool, not a booking app — find places here, then book/navigate elsewhere.
• Signing up with an overseas number tags you as an international user, which changes what the algorithm shows you — you will see more English-language posts and fewer purely local ones. If you are hunting for local recommendations, search with Chinese keywords rather than relying on your feed.