China Unlocked: How to Actually Survive: The Digital Survival Guide to Payments, Apps, Transport & 12 Must-See Cities

CN You have arrived in China. Your phone is now a brick.

Google Maps is blocked. WhatsApp is gone. You cannot call Uber, you cannot pay at restaurants, and hotel clerks stare because you are waving a credit card that does not work here. Welcome to China. China Unlocked: How to Actually Survive is the survival manual 47 million foreign travelers wish they had before boarding their flight. No politics, no fluff. Just the hard-core digital toolkit you need to operate in a country where everything runs on apps you have never heard of. Inside this book: WeChat as your everything app including messaging, maps, payments and food delivery. Alipay for seamless mobile payments with your foreign card. DiDi for ride-hailing with an English interface. VPNs that actually work. Translation tools so you never get lost. City by city guides to Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and more. Written by Wei Zhu, who has lived through every digital headache this book solves. This is not theory. It is battle tested survival advice from someone who got it wrong so you do not have to.