All you need to know before coming to China

Key words: China, foreigner, culture, language, food, visa, social media

From the writer
The content of this report will be based on my personal experience for five years, the experience of my friends and acquaintances. In my opinion, five years is not enough to understand all the cultural, linguistic, historical, spiritual, economic and legal nuances of China. Therefore, even now I continue to learn more and more new things about this great country. For convenience, the report will be divided into several parts that newcomers to China should pay attention to.

Visa, immigration bureau

Entry into the territory of China is carried out on the basis of a visa issued in advance at the Consulate of China or on the basis of a group visa-free list.
Upon arrival at the airport in China, you must go through passport control (a foreign passport is presented). And also many will additionally undergo the following procedures:
– Removal of fingerprints;
– Biometric face photo.
After that, it is extremely necessary in the first 24 hours (if you are late, a fine will follow) to register at the migration office at the place of arrival. This can be done through the hotel where you booked the room. To do this, you need to provide a foreign passport, it will be returned to you in a day.
If you came as a student, then the university can help you register with the migration office. In case you are a tourist, a travel company helps you.
If you are coming alone, I strongly recommend that you find information in advance about the migration offices in the city in which you will be staying.

PRC rules

When in Rome, do as the Romans do .
As guests in China, we must respect the local laws, traditions and culture. A complete and concise code of laws is available on the Internet in all languages of the world.

Culture, Traditions, Language

It’s no secret that Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages in the world. In total, there are about 50 thousand hieroglyphs in Chinese, the same number as there are words in the Ozhegov dictionary of the Russian language. In the modern language, however, only about 7 thousand characters are used. Nevertheless, 85% of the Chinese are literate – the same number as in the countries of Southeast Asia, not much less than in Korea and Taiwan (95%), and significantly more than in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan) – 55%.
By the way, everyone in China knows the Latin alphabet without exception, it is used to transcribe Chinese words, this is called writing in pinyin. However, not everyone speaks English, even in large cities such as Shanghai or Beijing.
Pinyin is written on computer keyboards: type, say, “shi” (“shi”) and 10-20 characters appear on the screen that sound almost the same or completely the same (the difference is in tones, there are four of these tones in official Chinese), and denote different things, from the verb “to be” to the nouns “deed, thing”, “fact”, “poem”, to the adjective “suitable”. You choose the one you need, and the program remembers what exactly you have chosen, and the next time it helpfully arranges the pop-up hieroglyphs in accordance with the frequency of their use by you.
In the image of many hieroglyphs, one can still guess stylized pictures, and the combination of parts in complex hieroglyphs sometimes says a lot more than the combination of letters and even roots in European words.
What we call the style of writing or font, in China is calligraphy, the art of writing hieroglyphs, not only applied, but also the highest: in most Chinese paintings you can see a poem by a classic or the artist himself, and in some paintings only there are hieroglyphs, and the beauty of hieroglyphs is no less important than the beauty of a verse or landscape. For a long time, by how beautifully a person writes, one can usually determine the level of education and culture.
Take a look at the Chinese characters – they are excitingly beautiful, although they mean little to the uninitiated. For the Chinese, they carry a much greater semantic load than the spoken language. First, often dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese in the south or even Shanghainese in the east, sound completely incomprehensible to each other and to those who speak Putonghua, the main and official Chinese dialect. And the hieroglyphs are understandable not only to all Chinese, but also to the Japanese, Koreans and many educated people in Southeast Asia, although they are pronounced differently everywhere. Therefore, they say that facsimile communication was invented, although not in China, but for China – to communicate in writing, through hieroglyphs, for Chinese with different dialects is not a problem.

Customs and traditions in China have been formed over several thousand years, where today there is a traditional value system, one of the main aspects of which is etiquette.
The culture of China began to take shape as early as 3000 BC. Over time, many of the traditions were lost, but most survived and survived to this day. In addition, the traditions of China are very diverse, as this country includes various nations and nationalities.
The traditions and customs of China are closely connected not only with its history, but also with those religions that are practiced in the country. In the west of China, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is located, the majority of the population of which is Muslim Uighurs, so the local population observes the customs and traditions characteristic of Muslim peoples.
Tibet is part of China, where the population has its own unique culture, the only one in the world, and therefore their traditions differ from the traditions of the rest of China. In addition to Muslims, Confucians and Buddhists live in China, who also follow their own traditions and customs.
However, most of the country’s population observes traditions and customs that are more than 3 thousand years old. However, this is precisely what China attracts millions of tourists from all over the world. Here you can not only see the unique monuments of the history of ancient Chinese civilization, but also plunge into the mysterious and sometimes closed world of the Chinese East.
Even an outside observer at a superficial glance cannot help but notice that the country has a huge stock of social and moral health. The Chinese are friendly, delicate, quick, speak 1000 words per minute and always smile. Everyone has such a reserve of vital energy that it seems to be enough for ten Europeans. Chinese life expectancy is 70 years on average.
I would also like to note traditional Chinese medicine, the attitude towards which is very respectful: in every Chinese clinic there must be a department of traditional medicine, which differs from the Western one in that it considers the human body as a whole and treats the disease in a complex way – if your ear hurts, you can be prescribed a massage spine, and acupuncture in the palm of your hand to activate the body’s resistance to the infection that caused the inflammation. At the same time, doctors practicing traditional medicine clearly understand its limitations – some diseases are not subject to it: for example, in traditional medicine there are practically no operations, with the exception of the simplest, so if you need an operation, you will be sent to another department.

Social network
China and the speed of its technological development never ceases to amaze. More than 800 million Chinese use the Internet, which is almost 58% of the entire population of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese social networks are among the top most popular social networks, on a par with Western counterparts.

The first in the list of social networks in China is WeChat. At the moment, it is the most popular messenger in mainland China, which is one of the five largest social networks in the world. The number of active users of the Chinese social network has already exceeded 1 billion people.
Legendary in the West and part of the everyday life of almost every Chinese, this social network has a number of distinctive features. This is not only a messenger and a social network, but also a web browser, a blog and public page service, a short video service, a payment system, games, and even a dating service.
WeChat also integrates many mini-programs with extensive functionality, from searching for airline tickets to paying for them online. Such versatility makes the all-in-one application almost indispensable in everyday life.

The second most popular Chinese social network is Weibo. Usually Weibo is considered the Chinese equivalent of Twitte.
Unlike WeChat, Weibo was created as a microblogging platform, not a messenger. While WeChat is more commonly used to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues, Weibo is a more public and open platform. Here, unlike WeChat Moments, posts, as well as likes and comments to them, are visible to everyone, not just mutual friends.

QQ is the most widespread instant messenger among Chinese social networks in China, which can be compared with WhatsApp or Viber familiar to everyone. In QQ, you can find various chat groups by interest.

Another popular Chinese social network and short video app is Douyin or TikTok as it is called in the West. This Chinese social network was first launched in 2016 and currently has over 1 billion users. Its target audience is young people aged 19 to 35 who actively not only consume, but also generate content on their own.
If you’re going to China, sooner or later you will have to use the map to determine your location, find the right place, as well as receive instructions on how to get to a certain place in China.
Maps from Yandex (Yandex Map) in China show only the main roads with very low detail. Google and its services in China are blocked, and maps from Google (Google Maps) in China just do not open. Even using the methods of unblocking blocked sites, the detail still leaves much to be desired. What is the solution for navigating China? China offers its own solution – Baidu maps.

The Baidu map has some features that are useful to consider when working:
– Application is in Chinese, without knowing Chinese it is a bit difficult to use, below are some tips.
– Displays a selection of all possible ways to travel to the destination: on foot, by bicycle, by public transport with the last route time, by car, by taxi and the approximate cost of the trip.
As for the Chinese number, a foreigner can buy it upon arrival in China. A passport is required to register a room.
Next, let’s talk about important applications such as Alipay and Taobao. The latter is perhaps the more famous for foreigners. Taobao is a huge marketplace where people can buy everything from books to furniture. I think, to some extent, it can be compared with the popular eBay.
Alipay provides a huge list of payment services. Utilities, payment of any bills, fines, insurance, etc., all this can be easily paid through AliPay. Purchases from Taobao or other platforms can be paid using Alipay. In China, in general, applications work in conjunction with each other, and it should be noted that they work very well. By the way, wechat also provides an opportunity to pay some bills.
However, in order to access e-wallets and make payments, a foreigner needs a Chinese bank card. This and many other things will be covered in other articles.

Food
It is difficult to characterize traditional Chinese cuisine unambiguously, since China is a huge country, inhabited by 56 nationalities, each of which has special culinary traditions and recipes. But that is why Chinese cuisine is so diverse and unique. The Chinese themselves say that they eat everything that flies, except for an airplane, and everything that has four legs, except for a table. Europeans can’t eat Chinese food for a long time, while the Chinese eat European food with pleasure, although it seems rustic to them – not the level of processing, and there are not enough ingredients. What is served in Chinese restaurants in Europe and America is a much lighter, Europeanized version of Chinese dishes; here, as in many other things, the Chinese show great skill in adapting themselves to local conditions without losing themselves.
To summarize, we can distinguish two main geographical regions: north and south. The main difference is that in the north, noodles are the main dish, or dumplings (fried, boiled, steamed) and unleavened bread (mantou). In the north, food is more salty, fatty and nutritious. In the south, preference is given to rice dishes (boiled rice, rice noodles, rice cake). At the same time, southern traditional cuisine is characterized by sweeter and spicier food.