About The China Door

The China Door is an independent English-language guide for people travelling to mainland China from abroad. It exists for one reason: most English coverage of China entry rules, payments and transport is either outdated or written by someone who has never queued at a visa centre. We publish fewer pages, check every rule against an official source, and print the date we last checked it. We take no payment from visa agencies.

Last verified: 29 October 2026 · Sources: our own editorial review of the pages on this site

Why does this site only cover inbound travel?

Because the questions are different when you are coming from outside. A Chinese domestic traveller does not wonder whether their passport is on the visa-free list, whether their card will link to Alipay, or whether the hotel can register a foreign passport in another province. Our reader arrives with a passport, a foreign credit card, a phone that may not work, and a flight to catch. That is the whole editorial brief, and it is narrow enough to do properly — one country, one direction, one reader.

It also means we can afford to re-check things. Visa-free lists, transit rules and payment limits change several times a year, and a general travel site cannot chase every rule for every country. We chase the rules for this one.

What we do, and what we do not do

We research, verify and write. We link to official pages so you can confirm anything that would be costly to get wrong. We do not process visas, act as an agent, book hotels or sell tours. We never ask for your passport number, and we do not take payment for a ranking, a review or a mention.

• We do publish the rule, the wording of the rule and the official link, plus a plain explanation of the exceptions.
• We do date every page and re-check entry and payment rules on a 30-day cycle.
• We do not promise visa outcomes or speculate about policy changes that have not been announced.
• We do not publish a page unless at least one of us can trace each number on it to a source.

How do we make money?

The site is funded by affiliate commissions and, later, display advertising. If you click a link to an eSIM provider, a rail booking platform or a travel insurance brand and buy something, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Pages that carry these links say so in a disclosure box on the page itself, and the disclosure is placed before the links rather than buried in the footer. Commission never decides which product appears in a table, and we do not accept payment for a ranking position.

If a page recommends something, the reason is written next to the recommendation — a price, a cancellation term, a route, a waiting time. If we cannot write that reason, the recommendation does not ship.

Who is behind the site?

The China Door is written and edited by Kola, its China editor, who lives in Shanghai, with specialist contributors for payments and rail. The team page lists who covers what, and our methodology page describes the sourcing hierarchy, the review cadence and the correction policy in full. Every rule page names the editor responsible and carries the date it was last checked.

The China Door is published by Kola, an individual publisher based in Shanghai, mainland China. There is no parent company, no investor and no sponsor: the site is funded by affiliate commissions, disclosed on the pages that use them and in the funding section above. Data-protection questions are covered by our privacy policy; write to editor@thechinadoor.com for anything relating to this site or its content.

How can you reach us?

For corrections, use editor@thechinadoor.com with the page URL and the sentence you believe is wrong; if you can, include the official source. We answer corrections within two working days and fix anything we can verify. For press or partnership enquiries, press@thechinadoor.com works — put the topic in the subject line. We do not run a visa advisory service and cannot answer individual immigration questions.

If you have just arrived and need the one decision that shapes the rest of the trip, start with the entry rule: which of China’s three tourist entry routes applies to you. Then settle the money question before you fly — what works at a Beijing till in 2026 — because a card that fails on arrival is the single most common complaint we hear from readers. Everything else on this site assumes you have settled both.