Which apps work, which do not, and the honest options for staying reachable. Plus what actually works for talking to us while you are there.
As a rule, most services operated by Google, Meta and X are not reachable from inside mainland China on a normal connection. That means Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube are generally inaccessible.
What does work normally: iMessage and FaceTime (Apple’s services are not blocked), Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Zoom, Skype, Telegram in some cases, and most banking and airline apps. Chinese equivalents — WeChat, Baidu, Amap, Douyin, Bilibili — work perfectly.
If your business runs on Gmail and your family talks to you on WhatsApp, the honest position is that you will be out of contact on those channels while in mainland China unless you take steps. For a one- or two-week holiday most people find that acceptable; for longer trips or if you are working, it matters.
The important exception: Hong Kong, China and Macao, China are not behind the mainland firewall. Everything works normally there. If your itinerary starts or ends in Hong Kong, China, plan your calls for those days.
The common workaround is a VPN, installed before you arrive — you cannot download one once you are inside, because the app stores themselves are affected. We are not going to recommend specific providers; reliability changes month to month and the legal position is genuinely ambiguous for visitors.
What we can say from experience: many guests travel with a VPN and it works most of the time but not always, speeds vary, and it fails more often during politically sensitive dates. If being reachable is critical, do not rely on it as your only plan.
The genuinely reliable alternative is to switch to the tools that work: WeChat for messaging and calls, email for anything that can wait, and your hotel’s wifi for a stable connection.
This is a question we get constantly, and the answer is that it is not a problem: our team is inside China, so we are on WeChat, on Chinese phone lines and on email — all of which work perfectly here.
Before departure we send you a WeChat contact and the phone numbers that work inside China, including our toll-free line 400-0971-400. If WhatsApp is the only channel you use, we will still receive your messages when you are on wifi outside the mainland, and we will route around it in the meantime. Every guest also gets the direct mobile number of their guide, which works normally.
Google Maps is unreliable and often simply wrong in China — it is blocked, and its Chinese mapping data is deliberately offset. Do not navigate with it.
Use Amap (Gaode) which has an English interface, or Apple Maps, which uses Chinese mapping data and works properly. On any trip with us your guide handles navigation anyway, and we send you station names and entrance letters in writing so you are never working it out from a map.
Tell us your dates, who is travelling and roughly what you want to see. Within 24 hours a China-based planner sends you a day-by-day itinerary with everything itemised — free, and with nothing to pay until you approve it.
Monday–Sunday, 09:00–21:00 Beijing time (UTC+8)
Free written itinerary within 24 hours