Mobile Phones:

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

If you plan to take your own phone and simply buy a ‘SIM’ card (and hence acquire a Chinese phone number) you might have to ‘unlock’ your phone in your home country beforehand. Therefore, once this is done, you can buy a new SIM card anywhere in China.

Of course, China is such a vast country that there is more than one option. The biggest players are China Mobile and China Unicom, which need you to head to one of their offices with your passport and formally register to get your Chinese phone number.

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). 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.

Mobile networks cover almost every village across the whole of China including the underground (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.

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 Public Phones).