Getting a phone number in China: channels and prices

Do you need a Chinese phone number to visit China? No. Several routes work with a foreign number or none, and the state guide for foreign business visitors assumes it: Alipay, WeChat and UnionPay accounts can be registered with foreign or Chinese phone numbers, metro fare gates in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu take overseas-issued bank cards, and train tickets can be bought on the 12306 English website or app with a passport (A Guide to Working and Living in China for Business Expatriates, 2026 edition, issued 2026-05-29, PDF downloaded 2026-10-11).

A mainland number matters in three cases: a Chinese-language service whose form takes only +86 numbers; SMS codes from Chinese platforms; or a stay long enough that a local plan beats roaming.

Does a local number change anything?

Payment, metro, bus, ride-hailing and train rows are from the 2026 MOFCOM guide (link, 2026-05-29). The Chinese 12306 form’s phone field offers one country code, +86 中国大陆, capped at 11 digits and verified by SMS; the English registration page accepts only foreign passports and asks for passport details, a date of birth, a username and an email address, with no phone field (Chinese page, English page, both read 2026-10-11). A municipal hospital booking platform requires a real name, ID number, mobile number and address, and accepts passports (platform notice, read 2026-10-11); one international hospital’s guide starts with a phone number and SMS code, then a face check, then document type, number and address (hospital guide, 2025-11-25). Meituan’s privacy policy requires at least a mobile number to create an account (Meituan rules centre, dated 2026-05-28, read 2026-10-11).

No page says the number must be mainland; none says a foreign number works. The verification is an SMS, which I cannot test.

The channels

Airport. Since 2025-01-01 the two Beijing airports have “北京服务” points at the arrivals level, and Beijing Unicom supplies three tiers of short-term card for a joint bank-card-and-SIM terminal there, deactivated at expiry (Beijing municipal government, 2025-01-13). The capital airport’s point, outside exit B, had served more than 110,000 foreign passengers by August 2025 (CAAC News, 2025-08-07). Pudong’s Terminal 2 station opened 2024-06-29 and runs 24 hours; Xinhua names the product at its telecom window as 7-, 15- and 30-day China Telecom cards sold against a passport (english.shanghai.gov.cn, 2024-06-29; Xinhua, 2024-07-01).

Carrier halls. The 2026 guide says to bring a passport or a Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card to a China Telecom, China Mobile or China Unicom service centre (link, 2026-05-29). Not every hall handles them: China Telecom’s filing limits its foreigner cards to halls with permission to process them (filing, read 2026-10-11).

Online. Unicom’s foreigner-facing store mails a SIM and activates it after you email your passport page, the SIM’s ICCID side, and a selfie holding both (store page, read 2026-10-11). Delivery inside the mainland is free and takes 2 to 3 days; international delivery is 15 US dollars for the first card and 5 for each additional one, 7 to 14 business days (store page, read 2026-10-11). One eligibility line excludes passport holders from six named countries — Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia — while a second copy carries no exclusion, and I could not tell which path each governs. No other carrier runs a store like it.

eSIM. Two products share the name. A mainland eSIM is an ordinary number: all three carriers were cleared by the industry ministry for commercial trials in October 2025 and put the service on sale nationwide (Xinhua, 2025-10-14; Shanghai’s government news page, 2025-10-15, read 2026-10-11). During the trial you activate it at a carrier-owned hall — China Telecom’s path is to book in the app and then go to the hall you booked (Xinhua, 2025-10-14). Plans and tariffs stay level with ordinary mobile service, the switch itself is free for now, and one handset can hold at most two mainland eSIM numbers, each from a different carrier if you like (China News Weekly’s walk through the carriers’ notices, 2025-10-31, read 2026-10-11). China Mobile’s trial terms allow only handsets launched in mainland China, and an eSIM counts toward the five-number limit on one ID (Beijing News, 2025-10-15). An international travel eSIM is a roaming product sold by third parties: its number belongs to a foreign operator, so it is not a mainland number and gets no mainland SMS.

What real-name registration requires

A 2013 ministry order, still in force, requires valid identification before a number is connected, and a foreign citizen’s passport is on the list of accepted documents (MIIT Order No. 25, issued 2013-07-16, effective 2013-09-01, articles 6 and 7). It records the document’s type and the name, number and address on it, and must refuse service when the customer will not show ID, uses someone else’s document or presents a forged one (articles 9 and 10). The 2022 anti-fraud law added the enforcement layer: it forbids issuing more cards than the national cap allows, lets an operator refuse a suspicious application and re-check identity later, and allows suspension of a number that fails re-verification (Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Law, passed 2022-09-02, articles 9 to 11). The cap is five cards per user per carrier nationwide (MIIT notice 工信部网安函〔2016〕452号, 2016-11-07); the same notice requires the counter to photograph the applicant and keep the picture, and a provincial MIIT office restates the ban on issuing a sixth card in a published case note (MIIT Hunan, 2023-04-26).

So at the counter you show the document itself and have your photograph taken there, both required by the texts above. China Telecom’s filing adds a prepaid account and a prepayment at least equal to the plan price, which I could not re-read today.

What the prices are

The filings addressed to foreign passport holders that I could find are China Telecom’s short-term cards. They are filed province by province, not as one national price list: the pages sit on the carrier’s provincial site, the plan numbers carry a province code and a year (24SH100222, 24SH100223, 24SH100224 for Shanghai), and the launch was announced by the provincial branch at 23 outlets across that city’s 16 districts (Shanghai municipal government, 2024-03-15). The same 15-day card is filed separately for Beijing at the same 125 yuan, as 24BJ100938 with a standard of 125元/15天 (China Telecom tariff zone, read 2026-10-11). Read these as two provinces’ filed prices, not a national rate card. Validity runs to a stated hour, and the card is decommissioned automatically.

Those China Telecom rows are the carrier’s filings, each stating eligibility as foreign individuals with a passport or a Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card, a prepaid account, a sales channel of permitted halls, and an online window of 2023-12-10 to 2026-11-30, with the price field printing per month even on the 7-day card (7-day, 15-day, 30-day, all read 2026-10-11). The same three prices were announced in March 2024, with the 85-yuan card given as 11.82 US dollars at that month’s rate (Shanghai municipal government, 2024-03-15), and the 7-day card’s 20 GB and 100 minutes repeat in the carrier’s own launch report (Sohu, quoting China Telecom Shanghai, 2024-03-15). The Unicom rows are from its foreigner-facing store (link, read 2026-10-11); one extra bundle line under the short-term tiers does not attach to any listed price.

China Mobile sells short-term tourist cards at its counters too: a 2025 municipal report describes 7-, 10-, 15- and 30-day tiers with up to 80 GB, 300 minutes and 100 yuan of international credit, expiring on their own (Beijing municipality, 2025-01-27). No carrier page I found publishes a price. The idea that airport counters cost more comes from travel blogs, not something I could check.

When you leave

For these prepaid tourist cards, nothing. China Telecom’s filings specify automatic decommissioning at expiry, China Unicom’s store says the short-term SIM terminates automatically after its validity period, and the Beijing products are described the same way (Beijing municipal government, 2025-01-13). Unused balance goes with the number.

Before your last day:

• Whether to keep the number. China Unicom says it can convert a short-term SIM into a long-term or international plan. China Telecom’s foreigner cards list their operating limits as suspension, resumption, decommissioning, replacement and top-up (filing, read 2026-10-11).
• The balance. China Unicom warns that a negative airtime balance can suspend the SIM.
• Any account tied to the number — chat, payment, booking history — survives the card only if the number does.

How I checked

Ministry orders and the anti-fraud law, the state guide for foreign business visitors, carrier tariff filings, carrier-owned service pages, and municipal or airport pages on what the counters sell. Each figure carries the source’s own date; volatile pages were read on 2026-10-11.

Two pages I read twice: the state guide (the 2024 Chinese edition asked for a work permit and a domestic phone number to open a bank account; the 2026 English edition lists identity documents only) and the Unicom store’s eligibility line, which exists in two versions, one with the six excluded countries and one without.

One fetch problem to declare. The three China Telecom filing pages refused every request today, returning HTTP 412 to curl with browser headers, directly, through a proxy, and in a headless browser. What I read was the search-engine index of those exact URLs, which reproduces each plan number, validity wording, price, decommission rule and eligibility text, plus a second province’s filing for the same card. I did not re-read the pages themselves.

What I could not check

• Whether a foreign passport works for eSIM phone service. Retried: the accounts conflict — a news reproduction of Unicom’s explainer lists a passport, a trade outlet’s copy of China Telecom’s guide lists passports, and a consumer site says both China Mobile and China Telecom take only a mainland ID card or Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card. All secondary; no carrier page I could open settles it.
• Airport counter prices. Retried: described in government and news pages without prices, and no carrier price page would load.
• Whether hospital or delivery platforms take a non-mainland number. Retried: their forms require a mobile number and verify by SMS; none states that the number must be mainland, none says a foreign number works. Travel guides claim Meituan takes international numbers at sign-up; no platform page says so.
• Parts of the China Telecom filing text. Only the 30-day card’s 300 minutes, 50 GB and overage rates are reproduced in the index I could read. The 15-day card’s 200 minutes and 30 GB, the 50 SMS on each card, and the filing’s prepayment and operating-limits lines (suspension, resumption, decommissioning, replacement, top-up) all come from filing text I could not re-read.
• DiDi’s mainland app. Retried: the 2026 MOFCOM guide says the app registers with international phone numbers, but that is a government document, not the company’s page.
• The one-number limit on non-ID documents. Vendor copy claims holders of other documents may register only one number per carrier. I could not re-locate that claim today and no carrier or regulator text supports it; the official rule is five per carrier.
• Opening hours of the airport SIM counters. Shanghai’s is documented as 24/7; I found no hours for the Beijing points.