After spending in China 6 months as a tourist, I found out that there is only one website to trust when booking hotels, flights, and trains: trip.com
All the others were letting you book for something that wasn’t even there, or sometimes you reserve a room downtown and later you’ll find out that the location is in the suburbs… It was a complete mess, so trust me, don’t make my mistakes, and use the link above!
Still, even when booking via Trip, you must check that the hotel has the license to host foreigners!
To do so, scroll down to Property Policies, and find the sentence: Guests from every country/region are accepted
While visiting Wuhan, it was a complete mess for me because I had no clue the hotel I booked didn’t accept foreigners. So always check it!
Another thing to know is that you need VPNs to do anything on our side of the internet (YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook), and here in China, I’ve been mostly using an unknown VPN, vpn.ac, and my guess is: less known VPN work better because they are less known… and if they want to take down someone, they’ll start from bigger companies like Surfshark or NordVPN.
Regarding payments, the must-app to download is Alipay, and thanks to it you will be able to play in 97% of the places you’ll hang out at.