Travelling to China relies a lot of pre-planning. If you yolo you only have yourself to blame

Seen a few comments on posts where people have had a bad time and it turns out it's because they didn't set anything up before they arrived.

Things to do at least weeks before your trip include:

• set up both wechat and alipay with your foreign card, ID verification etc (dont just make an account, also go in and find the ID and bank account checks and do them). Don't do this last minute. It's much harder to complete all the verification steps once you've already left your country.
• set up your metro access with the city(ies) you are going to. E.g. with shanghai you will go to daduhui app and verify your ID to obtain a QR which you use as your metro pass
• organise as many of the attraction tickets as you can from overseas -- Trip.com was great for me although it's definitely priced higher than in china for some things -- to me it's worth it to have service in English.

If anyone has anything else to add feel free to join in!