This article is for those who are not familiar with China, especially people first time come to China.

Travel

Room booking: ctrip (携程), Qunaer（去哪儿）. These two are biggest room booking app in China. Most hotels support booking without advanced payment, but in hot tourist seasons better pay deposit.

Ticket booking: 12306.com for train (China Train Authority ticket website), Ctrip for train and plane (携程).

Mapping: Baidu map(百度地图). Same as google map. It is easy for you to find routes (private drive, public transportation, walk and cycling) from A to B, find restaurants, super markets, KTVs, and many others around you. It provides free navigation service for driving, walking and cycling.

Taxi Booking: DIDI（滴滴打车）. It is the most helpful app for finding a taxi, AKA China Uber.

Travel blog: Mafengwo（马蜂窝）. No matter inside China or abroad, mafengwo has a large group of users and you can find lots of posts about any tourist spot of China. Most of posts are non-commercial, very useful for preparing a trip.

City public transport: All 1T and 2T cities have transport card, it is convenient to make payment just by swiping the card on a reader. Sure you can use cash as well, but not convenient. And bus doesn’t return changes.

Car rental: CAR (zuche.com 神州租车). Everywhere in China, most popular car rental company. Don’t suggest foreigners who hasn’t driven much in China. Becasue the traffic can be very chaotic, still there are many cars, bikes and walkers don’t follow traffic rules, especially in remote areas of a city.

Eating

dianping（大众点评）: It almost shows every restaurant, dishes, prices, comments, locations, decorations, ranks. The ranklist is very useful for choosing a right restaurant. You can use this app to book and even get discounts.

Zhifubao（支付宝）: It is not only a payment app. Zhifubao also provide service exactly as dianping.

Meituan（美团）:similar to dianping as well, but more focused on delivery food and discounts of group purchasing.

Elema（饿了么）: Focus on delivery food, cheap and fast.

Music

Kugou（酷狗）, QQ music（QQ音乐），163 music（网易云音乐）. There countless songs in the three apps, both English and Chinese.

Baiduyunpan（百度云盘）: Lots of piratic musics

Video

Youku（优酷）: The biggest

Aiqiyi（爱奇艺）: Rich in HD resources of movies and TV dramas

Baiduyunpan（百度云盘）: Lots of piratic movies and TV dramas. Search like – key in [Name of the movie] + [百度云盘] on google search or baidu search, there will show search results, check the results, you will find what you need. Baiduyunpan is free, but to download and or watch full videos, you need to sign up but it is free.

Communicate

Wechat and QQ. The two are major apps, everyone must at least has a QQ or wechat account. Nowadays wechat is much more popular than QQ, while QQ is the most popular one 5 years ago. They are both tencent’s.

Payment

Wechat and Alipay. Both are the most popular payment tools in China, similar to Paypal. Everywhere can use a wechat or alipay to do payment. No matter a small shop in the corner or 5 star restaurant， no matter a 1 yuan payment or 100,000 payment, easy and fast to make by wechat or Alipay. Now people use Alipay or wechat both for online and offline payment. All the app above support making payment through Wechat or Alipay. Actually Chinese don’t use credit card, or cash often.

Written by Mr. Daniel Su