Emails:

Most internet establishments, easily found in backstreets of all neighbourhoods, are not permitted to allow foreigners to use their internet services (they require Chinese ID cards to be submitted for usage).

If you’re without a working China smartphone, then best to use hotel wifi and services than finding an internal café en-route.

Baidu is the main Chinese search engine, more so as Google -and for that matter almost every website of interest and necessity- is blocked in China.

You’ll notice that most Chinese based email addresses contain the .cn postfix to denote it’s Chinese registration. On actual desktops, many computers will have an English or Chinese language option, which is usually found on the bottom ‘Windows’ toolbar as well as keyboard character typeset. Note: Chinese cannot be limited to 26, or anywhere near 26, letters on the alphabet and thus a keyboard! There’s thousands of character combinations so words are offered as a list as you type using pinyin (the romanised version of Chinese words and sounds) if using Chinese characters.

If you connect with colleagues you may be given their ‘QQ’ number – this is the Chinese equivalent of the old MSN (Messenger) live chat system and is still very much in use in businesses. However, all communication is done via Wechat (the Chinese Whatsapp) which has a desktop version, handy for downloads/uploads and PC file transfers.

WeCom is the workplace version of Wechat. It’s important to know that while it’s free to get Wechat, you need to link it to a Chinese bank account to start paying or sending money via Wechat.

Alternatively, Alipay (the Chinese PayPay) can make online payments also at almost very shop or outlet.