China Step by StepPractical intelligence

Public transport in China

Mainland China gives a foreign visitor four realistic ways to move: the metro, city buses, taxis and ride-hailing, and intercity rail. This page is not an introduction to any of them — it is the decision you make standing outside the arrivals hall with your bags, or on a street at half past ten at night. The choice is driven by three things you already know: how much luggage you are carrying, what time it is, and whether the trip is inside one city or between cities, so it is set out below as a situation table rather than a sequence of steps, with the sourcing marked on every row. Only a handful of transport tasks genuinely have to be finished before you fly; those are the steps, and everything else can be dealt with on the ground.

Should I do it before China?

Partly — some of it belongs before you fly

Buying a metro ticket, paying a bus fare and getting into a street taxi are all things you can do on the day, with cash if nothing else works. Three things are not: the mainland DiDi app has to be downloaded and registered before you need a car, the Alipay transit QR code only appears after identity verification has passed and only for the city you have selected, and a 12306 account with passport verification takes several working days to clear. Those three are the reason this module has a before-arrival half at all.

How

  1. Do before arrivalBetween cities the decision moves to rail, and rail starts weeks earlier: register a 12306 account and get your passport verified before you leave home. The official routes are letting the system check the name, nationality and document number you enter, or submitting a photo of the passport data page for manual review; the guidance suggests doing it one to two weeks out, because manual review is not instant and an account still marked pending has to be cleared with the original passport at a station ticket window.12
  2. Do before arrivalDownload the mainland China DiDi app (滴滴出行 / DiDi) at home and complete registration there. Official guidance says it supports registration with a foreign phone number and a foreign bank card, and registration needs an SMS code your phone can actually receive.9
  3. Do before arrivalIf you plan to ride the metro on an Alipay QR code, finish the identity verification before the trip: the official description is that you tap Travel, choose the city you are in, pass identity verification, and only then receive the metro QR code.7
  4. Do before arrivalSave your hotel address in Chinese characters before you fly — the booking confirmation screenshot works — so that the first taxi of the trip does not depend on a driver recognising an English hotel name. This is editorial judgement, not a sourced rule.11
  5. Can do in ChinaKeep a small amount of low-denomination RMB cash on you for transport specifically. It is the one payment method with a legal floor under it in this module, and it is the reason no phone failure can strand you.10

Situation → What to take

Six situations and what to take in each. Five rows rest on an official or operator source and one is our own judgement with nothing published behind it. Read the mark under each recommendation, and read the scope line with it: three of these rules were written for one named city and the numbers differ elsewhere.

5 of 6 rows carry an official or operator source. 1 is our own judgement with nothing published behind it, marked on the row.

SituationWhat to take
Arrival day, airport to hotel, all of your luggage with youA taxi or a ride-hailing car, not the metro. The rule itself is not the obstacle: Beijing’s metro passenger code caps an item at 30 kg, 1.8 m long and 0.5 m in width and height, and what it does not cap is the number of bags. Three readings after that are this site’s notes against that record rather than lines in the passenger code: that a common 28-inch case normally fits while oversized items, instrument cases and bicycles may be refused; that dragging two large cases through interchange corridors, stairs and lift-less exits at peak hour is the part that actually defeats people; and the fallback recorded with it — a taxi or DiDi on arrival day with all the luggage, and the metro afterwards.Source: Chinese government body · verified 2026-09-14 · applies to Beijing only; other cities may publish different figures
Still weighing metro against taxi while carrying bagsAdd the security check before you decide. Entry screening is compulsory rather than a spot check: Beijing’s passenger code requires passengers to accept and cooperate with it and lets screeners refuse entry to anyone who does not, and prohibited-item lists are published by the police. Every bag goes through an X-ray machine, and it repeats at each interchange where you leave and re-enter the paid area. The passenger code publishes no queueing time; the five to ten extra minutes at peak that this site works to is its own estimate against that record, not a figure Beijing published.Source: Chinese government body · verified 2026-09-14 · applies to Wording taken from the Beijing Rail Transit Passenger Code; other cities have their own equivalent rules
Travelling after about 22:00A taxi or a ride-hailing car. Chinese city metros are not 24-hour. On Shanghai Metro’s own timetable most lines run their last train somewhere in the 22:00–23:00 range, some suburban services finish earlier — Line 16 towards Longyang Road departs last at 21:00 — and parts of several lines run later only on Friday and Saturday. The same operator warns that sales for the last train stop three minutes before it arrives. The point that catches people out — the last-train time at your interchange is not the one at the station you start from — is this site’s note against that timetable rather than a line Shanghai Metro published.Source: Operator or service provider, official channel · verified 2026-09-14 · applies to Times taken from the Shanghai metro; last-train times differ by city and by line
Any other trip inside a city that has a metroThe metro. The 2025 official guidance for foreign visitors says you can buy a single-journey ticket at a station ticket window or a self-service machine, and that a frequent rider can take a passport to the window for a stored-value card. Payment may be a domestic or foreign bank card, RMB cash or a mobile payment app — but the same text defers to the acceptance marks and the cashier for what any particular counter or machine actually takes, so a foreign card is not guaranteed at a given machine.Source: Chinese government body · verified 2026-09-14
A short hop you would otherwise take a city bus for, without reading ChineseOur judgement is the metro or a taxi instead, and we want to be clear that nothing published says so. The record behind this row is our own inference, not an official source: it observes that the two directions of a Chinese bus line have separate stops on separate sides, that an English map app gives the direction by naming the terminus and listing the stop sequence, and that on-board announcements are usually in Chinese with English added in some cities. The preference for metro or taxi over a bus is ours.Editorial judgement — no official source
Between citiesRail — but the constraint is the ticket, not the train. Identity verification has to pass before a foreign passenger can buy: the official routes are the 12306 English site or app checking the name, nationality and document number you enter, an online submission of the passport data page for manual review, or the passport itself at a station ticket window. While the account reads pending, the station window is the only way to buy. That is why this is a before-you-fly task rather than a row you can act on from the arrivals hall.Source: Chinese government body · verified 2026-09-14

What can go wrong

Every app on your phone has failed and you need to get into the metro right now.

What to do instead Use cash at a ticket machine. The Ministry of Transport rules require at least one machine in each group of ticket machines to accept cash and to be in working order, and require extra staffed windows to be opened when machines fail on a large scale.5

Same situation, but on the street, and the taxi driver is waiting for payment.

What to do instead Pay in RMB cash. The People’s Bank of China named railways, buses and taxis in the 2020 announcement that prohibits refusing cash, so a street-hailed taxi has to take it. Carry small notes: the obligation to accept cash is not an ability to change a large note at night.10

You read that you can tap a contactless Visa or Mastercard straight through the metro gate.

What to do instead That is a Beijing-only capability, published by the Beijing Foreign Affairs Office for Beijing’s own network. Do not assume the same card works at a gate in Shanghai, Xi’an or Chengdu — in other cities buy a ticket at the counter or a machine, or use a transit QR code.6

You planned to sort out train tickets after landing, the way you would book a flight.

What to do instead Passport verification on 12306 is described by the Beijing Foreign Affairs Office as normally taking three to five working days after submission. Register and verify before departure, or accept that your first train may have to be bought at a station window.13

You open the Alipay transit code for the first time standing at the gate, with a queue behind you.

What to do instead The code is issued after identity verification passes and is selected per city, and the source only says some apps and some cities are covered. Buy a single-journey ticket at the counter or machine for this ride and set the code up later.7

Last verified and sources

Each record below is shown as provenance: who published it, what kind of document it is, how far it reaches and when we last checked it. The source’s own wording is not reproduced here — most of these documents are published in Chinese, and a translation of ours would be a paraphrase standing where a citation should be. Follow the link to read any of them in the original.

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