About VisitChinaHub
China, decoded by someone who lives here.
VisitChinaHub is an independent editorial journal about travelling China: the payments, the rail network, the visa-free paperwork, and the 5,000 years of heritage most visitors walk past. No press trips disguised as reviews, no group-tour upsells.
Why this site exists
I grew up in Hangzhou, an hour by train from the water towns of the Yangtze delta and a morning’s ride from Shanghai. I studied heritage conservation in Nanjing, spent years photographing timber-framed halls and stale museum labels, and then watched something odd happen: the country I knew how to navigate became the country my foreign friends found almost impossible to pay for anything in.
The questions they asked were never the ones guidebooks answered. Not “what is the Forbidden City” but “which gate do I enter so I don’t queue for ninety minutes”. Not “what is high-speed rail” but “how do I buy a ticket with a passport at 6 a.m. when the app refuses my card”. Not “what is authentic Chinese food” but “how do I order without a menu I can read, in a city where the restaurant’s QR code wants a Chinese phone number”.
VisitChinaHub is my attempt to answer those in one place, in English, with the version of the answer a resident would give a friend — including the parts that change every few months. I write from a base in Hangzhou, and I travel with the same passport problems, payment apps and rail timetables as the readers I am writing for.
Editorial standards
Primary sources first
Visa-free transit rules come from the National Immigration Administration and the local entry-exit bureau, not from a forum thread. Payment onboarding is verified on a phone with a foreign card. Rail booking windows come from China Railway’s own ticketing app.
A date on every claim
Every guide states when it was last re-verified, and material changes are noted at the top. If a rule changes while an article is out of date, the correction lands before we publish anything new on the subject.
Independence is structural
We take no payment for a positive review, a place cannot buy its way into a guide, and every commercial relationship — advertising, affiliation, referral — is disclosed in the article and on the disclosure page.
Corrections are public
Email a correction with the article URL and a source. If we got it wrong, we fix the article, note the change at the foot of the piece, and reply to you. No silent edits.
How we make money (and what it does not buy)
An independent travel journal with no advertising and no affiliate revenue is a hobby, not a publication. Ours is funded by three streams, each disclosed wherever it appears:
Advertising
Display advertising served by Google AdSense. We keep it out of the text, label it clearly, and never place ads inside an article’s opening paragraph.
How cookies workAffiliate commissions
If you book a train, a hotel or an eSIM through a link here, the partner may pay us a commission. It costs you nothing extra and never changes what we recommend.
Full affiliate listPDF guides & itinerary referrals
We sell a small number of downloadable guides, and we take a fixed referral fee when a licensed operator we introduce ends up planning your trip. Nobody pays to be recommended.
See the guidesWhat we cover
Four sections, deliberately narrow. We would rather publish twenty guides that work on the ground than two hundred that paraphrase a tourism board.
- From the sandstone pillars of Zhangjiajie to the neon riverfront of Shanghai — where to go, when to go, and how to dodge the crowds while you are there.
- Five thousand years of architecture, ritual and craft — explained without the plaques, and with the symbols most visitors walk straight past.
- The unglamorous knowledge that makes a China trip work: 240-hour visa-free transit, Alipay and WeChat Pay, 350 km/h rail, and day-by-day routes that actually fit.
- What China eats, drinks and queues for — regional kitchens, night-market etiquette, and the everyday rituals of a country that lives half its life on a phone.
What you will not find here
- “Top 10 Instagram spots in Shanghai” listicles written from a desk in another country.
- Visa advice framed as legal advice. We explain the rules and link to the source; the decision is an immigration officer’s.
- Fabricated reviews. We do not invent travellers or testimonials.
- Any commercial arrangement where a venue pays for placement. It has never happened and is not for sale.
Corrections & contact
If something here is out of date or wrong, write toeditor@visitchinahub.com with the URL and a source. We answer every correction, and we publish the fix with a note at the foot of the article.