The moment I switched off airplane mode at Pudong, my phone showed “No Service” for about three minutes. This was expected. I’d planned for it. And there I was anyway, standing in the middle of the arrivals hall doing that thing where you keep staring at the signal bars hoping they’ll change.

Here’s the embarrassing part: I had an eSIM already set up. That was the problem. I’d activated it too early, the plan had been counting down days from purchase, and by the time I landed it had expired. Twenty minutes later I was at the China Unicom counter showing my passport to a staff member while a queue of equally disoriented tourists formed behind me.

So let me save you that particular flavor of annoyance.

The options

An eSIM is still the right call for most travelers, and I say that as someone who screwed it up the first time. Buy a data plan from a service like Airalo or Holafly before you leave. You get a QR code by email, scan it in your phone settings, and you arrive connected. No queue, no physical card, no fumbling with a SIM ejector pin over an airport trash can.

Your phone needs to support eSIM. Most iPhones from the XS onward do, as do most recent Android phones. Check by going into Settings and looking for an “Add eSIM” option under Mobile Data. If you bought your phone through a carrier on a payment plan, it might be locked. Worth checking before you rely on it.

The mistake I made: pay attention to when the plan activates versus when it expires. Some plans start counting from purchase, not from first use. Activate it the day before you fly, double-check the expiry, and you’ll be fine.

If eSIM doesn’t work for your phone, or you’d just rather sort it in person, there are counters from China Unicom and China Mobile in the arrivals area at every major airport. Beijing Capital, Shanghai Pudong, Guangzhou Baiyun, they all have them before you exit to the street. Bring your passport, because they need it, no exceptions. The plan I bought was 100 RMB (about $14) for 10GB over 30 days. If you land on a busy evening, the queue can run 30-45 minutes. Not terrible, just slower than you want when you’re carrying bags and haven’t slept properly.

SIM shops also exist near most major train stations if you miss the airport option. Ask your hotel.

International roaming is the zero-effort option if your carrier includes China at a flat daily rate. Check the exact rate first. Some plans charge $10-15 per day, which for a short trip is fine. Others charge per megabyte, which is a very different situation. The carrier websites can be confusing about this, so look specifically for the page that explains China coverage.

The VPN thing

Here’s what most SIM card guides either bury or skip: your connectivity problem in China isn’t really about which SIM you pick. It’s about whether the apps you actually rely on work once you’re connected.

Google Maps doesn’t work in China. Neither does Instagram, WhatsApp, Gmail (unreliably), most news sites, and a long list of other things. This isn’t a SIM issue. It’s geographic. You’re behind the Great Firewall, and it applies to every SIM, including tourist ones.

To use those services, you need a VPN. The part that catches people: you cannot download VPN apps once you’re inside China. The App Store and Play Store are filtered there. Download and set up your VPN before you board.

I’d known about this for weeks before my trip. Still almost forgot to actually test it. Set it to auto-connect, confirm it works before you leave, and then stop thinking about it.

One honest caveat: VPN reliability in China varies by service and honestly by week. The ones I used held up well for most of three weeks, with occasional slow patches. I’m not going to name-recommend a specific service because this stuff changes, and I don’t want to send anyone somewhere that’s since been blocked. The subreddits focused on China travel are more current than any blog post on which services have been working recently, including this one.

How much data?

Over three weeks, I used about 8GB. That covered daily navigation, translation apps, WeChat and iMessage, occasional video calls. No streaming video. If you plan to stream, budget more.

The estimate I’d suggest: figure out what you think you need, then buy the next size up. Running out of data in a city you don’t know, with a language you don’t read, is not a situation you want to troubleshoot on the fly. The price difference between a 5GB and 10GB plan is usually a few dollars.

One practical advantage to eSIM over a physical SIM: you can keep your home number active at the same time. Once I got my situation sorted, I had my regular number receiving calls and texts while the eSIM handled data. With a physical SIM swap, your home number goes offline completely.

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What this has to do with the app I built

Before the trip, my co-builder Yue and I had been working on China Ready Travel for a few months. The trip was where a lot of things got tested against reality, and connectivity was one of the first pain points we’d anticipated. Getting your phone sorted before landing is one of the flagged blocking items in the app’s checklist, meaning it won’t mark your prep as complete until you’ve addressed it. VPN setup is in there too.

The reason that matters: most of what the app does assumes you might not have data at any given moment. The show cards, which are large-text bilingual cards for communicating with taxi drivers or hotel staff, work completely offline. So does the emergency contact hub. When I had those twenty minutes of dead connectivity at Pudong, it wasn’t a crisis partly because I’d already pulled the offline content before boarding.

Yue handles all the Chinese language content in the app, including the show card text and the dish translation database. We could have run everything through Google Translate and called it done. We didn’t, because the cards would have been technically correct and socially awkward in ways that matter when you’re handing your phone to a stranger and asking for help.

The app is free to download. The pro unlock is $5.99 one-time if you want the larger feature set. China Ready Travel on the App Store.

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The short version

eSIM if your phone supports it. Activate it the day before you fly, check the expiry date. Airport tourist SIM as backup: China Unicom counter in arrivals, passport required, 50-100 RMB covers most trips. International roaming if your carrier includes China at a flat daily rate.

And separately from all of that: download your VPN before you land. Not after.

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Still want to add better connectivity guidance inside the app itself. Right now it’s a checklist item without much detail on how to evaluate eSIM plans or which VPN services have been working recently. That’s a gap. If you hit something different from what I described here, or the VPN situation has shifted since I last checked, drop a comment. This stuff moves fast enough that I’m probably already a little behind on something.