Mobile Phones

Most foreign mobile phones won’t work in China. It all depends on China’s network agreements with your home service provider. So in most cases, they won’t. Check with your service provider before you leave.

Simply buy a ‘SIM’ card (and hence acquire a Chinese phone number) on arrival at the airport. If this is not possible, you'll need to visit one of the many China Mobile, China Telecom or China Unicom shops which will set you up. Take your passport. This process can take a couple of hours. You might have to ‘unlock’ your phone in your home country beforehand as this trick restricts you using other networks globally if you have a 'contract phone'. Therefore, once this is done, you can buy a new SIM card anywhere in the world, including China.

There are province-specific cards, which are cheaper to make calls with but only cover one or a bunch of provinces. Finally, there are city-specific cards, which are dirt cheap to use but naturally, only cover your city or prefecture (a prefecture is one part of a province). Almost no one buys these now. So, we don’t recommend any of those. China Mobile, one of the major nation-wide providers, has branches almost everywhere and the main mode of payment is through the Wechat function ‘top-up mobile’. This is the ‘contract’ version of mobile phones that are so common in the West. Check out our Internet guide on Wechat usage!

Mobile networks cover almost every village across the whole of China including the underground (metro/subway) in all the major cities. Chinese phones also use ‘pinyin’ (English characters to type Chinese characters) so it’s possible to text message in English to/from a Chinese phone. If in doubt, you're never far from a wifi signal. Heading to a coffee shop and accessing their wifi is a sure way to catch up with messages.

Unfortunately, Chinese registered mobile phones are also prone to a lot of ‘spam’ and unwanted calls. Mobile phone theft used to be pretty common on public transport and this has certainly improved considerably, but still, keep your precious phone hidden from view at all times!

(see also Public Phones).