MapTrip writes about a country where the facts move fast. Visa lists gain and lose countries, payment apps quietly kill products, and what worked on a phone in Shanghai last month may not work today. This page is the set of rules we hold ourselves to — written plainly enough that you can check whether we actually followed them.
Where a fact is allowed to come from
We rank sources, and the rank decides what we're permitted to write:
- Official and primary sources first — National Immigration Administration and Ministry of Foreign Affairs announcements, government travel advice (we lean on the UK FCDO's China page for legal wording), a provider's own pricing and terms page, an operator's own help center.
- Wire-service and established news outlets — used only where no primary source publishes the fact, and attributed by name and date.
- Dated reports from named traveler communities — principally r/chinalife and r/TravelChina. These cover the things no official body publishes: whether an app connects, whether a station gate reads a foreign passport.
Hard facts come only from the first two tiers — a price, a policy list, a threshold, what a product does. Traveler communities supply dated experience, not facts about the world. Other travel guides sit below all of that: sometimes the only account of a pattern is one that trip guides and blogs describe consistently while no official body documents it at all — a WeChat signup hurdle, a payment retry lockout. We do relay those, and when we do we say so inside the sentence ("traveler guides consistently report"), so it reads as a reported pattern rather than an established fact. What we never do is let a travel blog stand in for a primary source on something a primary source publishes. A claim that can expire — a price, a fee threshold, a policy list, a booking window — carries the date we checked it, written into the sentence ("verified 2026-08-28", "as of August 2026").
Why we never say a VPN "works in China"
Connectivity inside China is not a stable fact about the world. It depends on your carrier, your protocol, your city, and what the firewall did that week. Two people standing on the same street with the same app get different answers.
So the strongest form of that claim we allow ourselves is a dated, attributed report: as of August 2026, travelers on r/chinalife and r/TravelChina report X — never a flat "X works." When a service's own documentation admits it is blocked, we say that instead, because that is a primary source.
We also keep the legal question separate from the practical one. The law and the enforcement pattern are different things, and merging them is how travel content ends up implying permission it can't give. The official position gets quoted from its source; what travelers report stays an observation about reports, not safety advice.
What the "last updated" date actually claims
Sixteen guides sit on a volatile list — the ones carrying prices, policy lists, and booking windows. A script in the repo flags any of them whose date is more than 35 days old, and a per-guide checklist spells out exactly what has to be re-checked, item by item, against a primary source.
The date means something specific: on that day, every item on that guide's checklist was re-verified — not "we edited one sentence." If nothing had changed, we still move the date, because the check itself is the fact worth reporting. If we fixed one line without working the rest of the list, the date does not move.
This exists because of a failure, not a philosophy. Our Alipay guide taught a discontinued product for months; it was caught on 2026-08-21 only because a diagram contradicted a neighbouring guide. Nothing in a website's build breaks when a page goes quietly wrong, so staleness has to page us on its own.
Affiliate income and rankings
We earn commission on some outbound links, disclosed at the link and listed in full on the Affiliate Disclosure page. Rankings follow the evidence, and here is what that looks like in practice rather than as a promise:
- Our eSIM guide named Airalo's unlimited plan the top pick when it shipped on 16 August 2026. The Airalo affiliate program approved us on 28 August 2026 and the tracking link went live on the site the same day; the reader discount codes followed on 29 August 2026. The verdict predates the commercial relationship by twelve days and did not change when it arrived.
- Where we earn nothing, we are free to say skip — and do. Our VPN guide tells you Mullvad's own support documentation acknowledges the firewall blocks its servers, and that as of August 2026 travelers report it generally does not work: "Skip it for this trip."
- In the three-way VPN comparison, the provider travelers report as most consistent is also the most expensive, refunds nothing, and is harder to set up. Not the commercially convenient answer — just what the reports said.
- Re-verification runs before monetization. The 28 August 2026 pass over the VPN and eSIM guides is committed as a "pre-affiliate gate" — every price re-checked from the providers' own pages before any link was switched on.
Corrections
When something is wrong we fix it and re-run the guide's full checklist before touching the date. Where a fact materially changed, we say so rather than editing it away silently.
If you find an expired price, a closed attraction, or a policy that has moved, send the URL and one line about what's wrong to hyg520csh@gmail.com — it reaches a person, not a queue. More ways to reach us are on the Contact page.
See it in the guides
- VPN in China for tourists — the legality section quotes the FCDO directly and keeps enforcement observations separate from the law.
- ExpressVPN vs Astrill vs NordVPN in China — closes with a sources note listing which pages were checked, on what date, and which claims are traveler reports rather than measurements.
- Best eSIM for China — every price in the comparison table is dated and pulled from the providers' own storefronts, not from aggregators.