Living in China: A Practical Guide for Expats
Moving to China gets you through the arrival. Living here is the next problem: turning temporary solutions into systems you can use every week.
A phone number becomes more than a SIM once it is connected to payments, deliveries or account recovery. A home becomes more than an apartment once it determines the routes to work, school and healthcare. This guide connects those pieces so you can build daily life in an order that is practical, resilient and easier to maintain.
Turn temporary solutions into systems you can rely on.
Your first days are about making the arrival lawful, functional and recoverable. The first month is when temporary workarounds begin to become infrastructure.
You need a working communication route, a way to pay, an address that works for your stay and enough information to move through the first few days. That does not mean every long-term decision has to be finished immediately.
Once daily life starts repeating, the question changes. The number you keep, the payment methods you trust, the journeys you make, the healthcare route you would actually use and the home that has to work on an ordinary Tuesday all start to depend on one another.
Stop asking “Have I set everything up?”
Ask instead: “If I have to use this every week, is it reliable enough?”
| Daily-life system | Temporary solution | What a stable version should answer |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | Any connection that gets you online | Can you keep the number and recover access if the phone is lost or replaced? |
| Payments | One method that works once | Do you have a tested main route and an independent backup? |
| Housing | Somewhere suitable for arrival | Does the address work for your real week, not just one commute? |
| Healthcare | Knowing a hospital exists | Do you know where routine and urgent care would start? |
| Transport | Knowing the main apps or stations | Do your actual journeys work at the times you repeat them? |
| Records | Documents scattered across apps | Can you recover important addresses, contacts and records when something fails? |
The goal is not a perfect system. It is to remove the points where one small failure can disrupt everything else.
Think beyond the SIM card.
A working connection matters quickly. A long-term number matters because other parts of daily life may begin to depend on it.
Individual telephone service in China uses real-name registration. A foreign passport can be used as a valid identity document for individual telephone-user registration. Exact operator plans, channels and service procedures can still vary, so those details should be checked with the current operator rather than treated as one national workflow.
Access is only the first layer.
Once the number works, ask what happens if you lose the phone, replace the device, change the number, cannot receive a verification message or need to recover an important account.
Do not keep every important contact inside one messaging app. Keep your home address, employer or host contact, insurer details and other critical information somewhere you can reach without depending on the same phone you are trying to recover.
Make payments reliable first. Treat banking as a separate decision.
Cash, bank cards and mobile payments are all part of the payment landscape, but merchant acceptance, card support and app arrangements can depend on the particular merchant, product, issuer or provider.
This page does not assume one nationwide foreigner bank-account process.
Eligibility, required documents, processing, branch handling and available services should not be presented as uniform. A checklist from another resident—or another branch—is not automatically a national rule.
Practical rule: make payments work first; treat personal banking as a separate decision when your actual life creates the need.
Choose the week, not just the apartment.
A housing search becomes more useful once you stop asking only “Which neighbourhood is good?” and start asking “What does my household have to reach repeatedly?”
Put the important destinations on the same map: workplace, partner’s workplace, school or childcare, healthcare you may use regularly, frequent rail or airport connections and other places that genuinely repeat in your week.
Label each important destination: Fixed · Provisional · Unknown.
If one major anchor is still uncertain, the housing decision may not be fully ready.
Test the whole week.
Do not look only at the number of minutes shown by a route-planning app. Include the walk out of the building, transfers, waiting, the final connection, realistic travel times and what changes with children, luggage or mobility needs.
| Question | What you are testing |
|---|---|
| Does the location work? | The household’s repeated journeys |
| Does the building work? | Access, condition and daily use |
| Does the transaction make sense? | Counterparty, terms, costs and evidence |
| Does the address work administratively? | Registration and other processes that apply to the stay |
A beautiful apartment can still fail the week. A cheaper home can become expensive in time and friction. A fashionable district is not automatically useful if it breaks the routines that brought you to the city.
If you are staying somewhere other than a hotel, accommodation registration needs early attention.
The national material used for this guide supports registration within 24 hours, with the foreigner or host able to handle the registration. The exact local channel should still be kept separate from the national requirement.
Build a care route before you need one.
You do not need one hospital that supposedly solves every possible problem. You need a route.
120 is the national pre-hospital medical emergency call number.
Local emergency systems are implemented locally, so a national number should not be turned into a claim that every local service pathway works identically.
Do not infer service from a label.
“Public”, “private” or “international” may help you begin a search. Those labels do not by themselves establish whether the service you need is available, whether your preferred language is supported, whether urgent care is available at a particular time, whether an insurer has a network arrangement or whether direct billing is available.
Those are provider questions.
| Route | Use it when… |
|---|---|
| Healthcare hub — /healthcare/ | You want to discover healthcare resources and providers. |
| Practical healthcare guide — /healthcare/guide | You want to understand broader healthcare decisions before provider-specific detail. |
Connect the places you actually repeat.
Transport has two different scales: between cities, and inside the city where your week actually happens.
Between cities
Rail travel has a national identity-verification layer. Foreign-passport holders must pass identity verification in the covered rail ticketing flow, and station-window verification remains available within that flow.
That is useful national orientation. It should not be expanded into a universal claim about every transport mode.
Inside your city
Metro payment, ride-hailing interfaces, local card support, airport connections and individual app behaviour can vary by location and provider. Those details belong in city or operator guidance rather than in a nationwide promise.
Treat transport as the connection between your anchors.
Your home, workplace, school and healthcare may all look close enough on a map. The useful question is whether those journeys still form a workable week once you include real travel times, transfers and final connections.
Know which kind of answer you are looking for.
Many frustrations in daily life come from using the wrong source for the question.
A national rule may still have a local implementation. That is why an experience in Shanghai should not automatically become an instruction for Beijing or Shenzhen.
Beijing
Use local guidance when the question depends on Beijing services, routes or implementation.
Shanghai
Use the established Shanghai city hub when the question has become local.
Shenzhen
Use local guidance when the question depends on Shenzhen services, routes or implementation.
Build backups into daily life.
Convenience is useful. Resilience is what you notice when convenience stops working.
Primary + backup
The purpose is not to prepare for every possible failure. It is to avoid letting one device, one app, one card or one account become the only doorway into several parts of your life.
| Primary | Backup |
|---|---|
| Main payment method | Another way to pay |
| Phone contact list | Critical contacts stored offline |
| Navigation app | Address you can show or read independently |
| Preferred healthcare route | Alternative or emergency route |
| Digital document | Copy you can retrieve independently |
| Main account or device | Recovery information |
A useful test is: “If this stopped working tonight, what else would stop with it?”
If the answer includes payments, access to your home information, important contacts and account recovery at the same time, you have found something worth backing up.
Move to the page that matches the problem you still need to solve.
Do not keep reading national guidance once the remaining problem has already become specific.
| If your next question is about… | Go here |
|---|---|
| Home, lease, accommodation registration or practical housing checks | Renting & housing guide → |
| How healthcare works | Practical healthcare guide → |
| Finding healthcare resources or providers | Healthcare hub → |
| Rail travel or everyday mobility | Transport guide → |
| Shanghai-specific life | Shanghai city guide → |
| Professional help with a defined problem | Find Services → |
A provider is most useful when the problem is defined. Start with the guide that clarifies the decision, then use professional support for the part that actually needs it.
Continue with the part that needs more detail.
Moving to China
Shanghai for foreigners
Living in China: quick answers
Do I need to set up everything immediately after arriving in China?
No. The first days should remove immediate points of failure. Long-term housing, the final mobile setup, banking decisions and other optimisations can follow once you have enough local evidence to make a better decision.
Do I need a Chinese bank account to live in China?
That depends on what you need to do. This page does not establish a universal foreigner bank-account requirement or nationwide opening process. Get everyday payments working first; if salary, transfers or other resident banking needs make an account relevant, confirm the current process directly with the bank.
Should I choose long-term housing before I arrive?
Research can begin before arrival, but a long-term housing decision is stronger once you can inspect the home and test the actual journeys that will shape your week. Temporary accommodation can preserve flexibility while important work, school or other anchors are still uncertain.
Which healthcare page should I use?
Use the healthcare hub when you want to browse resources or providers. Use the practical healthcare guide when you want to understand how to plan routine care, urgent care, insurance and other healthcare decisions.
Evidence behind this guide
This page uses ExpatChina’s national source set for accommodation registration, telecom real-name registration, payment services, rail identity verification and emergency orientation, with provider or local sources used only where a local or provider claim is retained.
- Moving to China: What to Do Before and After You Arrive
- Shanghai for Foreigners
- ExpatChina healthcare guidance
- ExpatChina housing and transport guidance
Find the right support for the problem you actually need to solve.
Start with the relevant guide or directory. If the question still requires a local provider or professional service, continue to Find Services.