Thinking about traveling to China for 2 weeks. Specifically interested in Hong Kong and Beijing. Is it safe? Is it okay if I don't speak Mandarin?

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Yes. You’ll be fine. The employees in your hotels will speak English and will happy to help you.

If you need a taxi to take you somewhere, ask an employee in the hotel to write a taxi card for you. They’ll write down what you need in Chinese and you can hand it to the driver.

I’ve been to Beijing a number of times, and I quickly learned how to point at things that I want. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to communicate without language. It’s especially easy there because they are used to having lots and lots of visitors that don’t speak Chinese.

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All the train stations have english and announce stops in English. A lot of english speakers in these 2 cities. Chinese students learn english, albeit some will be better than others

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Your main concerns may be on money. They use wechat or Alipay for almost everything. Some places even refuse cash. For rides, use DiDi and for food I used local app which is only available in Chinese but I could follow the pics. Many people can speak English as well

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Go to Shanghai. You won’t regret it!

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Yes, Shanghai is much cleaner and definitely worth visiting

Hong Kong is not a problem. You can get by on English without a problem nearly everywhere as it was formerly a British territory. As EY1 said get taxi card filled out in Chinese if taking taxi. Uber is readily available in HK, so that makes it easy to get around without communicating. Public transportation is easy and also has everything in English. Most restaurants have an English menu.

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I lived in China for a while. Don’t expect the average person to speak any English at all. Most everyday stuff is in Chinese only, but yes, you can definitely get around if you have your hotel help you out with directions etc.

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Safe? Yes. You can be comfortably walking in the street alone 4AM.

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I hired a driver to drive four of us to the Great Wall from Beijing for the day quite inexpensively. Google Beijing Joe tourguide service. There are several popular segments of the wall to visit...I did Mutianyu, which was safe, clean, organized, and beautiful (with some very strenuous walking/hiking!).

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Do your research on what not to eat while there. YouTube has lots of videos

I’m going to China for fun next week (Beijing huangshan hangzhou Shanghai). Any additional recommendations on must-dos, place to eat, things to do before I leave? TIA 🙂

Some large (millions of people) protests happening in HK lately against the proposed extradition law FYI

Would recommend Taipei or Tokyo over cities in China, if it bothers you at all that the Chinese government is running concentration camps for people of Turkic ethnic ancestry (see: Uyghurs).

HK is one of the safest cities in the world, places in Kowloon specifically can be difficult for English only speakers but it’s not that bad. HK also has some of the worlds best food and holds the most (and cheapest) Michelin star restaurants I believe

100x Safer than any large American city

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