i have been travelling to many countries and now working in China and although China is very safe but China is one of the country that is not backpackers friendly. The CCP’s dream is to monitor every people who lives in the country. When someone enters China, the CCP wants to know where you live, so you need to register yourself to the police station and some hotels does not accept foreigners, in fact in most outskirt areas, all hotels wont accept you. If these hotels have this kind of restriction, airbnb is worse and backpacker normally does not look for hotels, they look for cheap accommodation or couchsurfing. Even those chinese having a hard time to host you without having to face problems with the police. Eventhough CCP wants you to visit china, they only want you to visit the places that they WANT YOU TO VISIT. Some backpackers prefer to explore uncharted places, how can this be done when you can’t find a place to sleep? They have lots of nice places to go such as Xinjiang and Tibet. If you visit xinjiang, there will be security checkpoints all over the places. Would you want to waste your money to visit this kind of places? i went to Ningxia on a backpacking trip to visit a famous mosque located in a small village. I checked-in at the nearby hotel but after few minutes, 5 policemen came and I was brought to the police station for questioning for 3 hours. All my things were inspected, even the pictures and videos in my smartphone were inspected! imagine if you have a sensitive photos of your girlfriend/wife and suddenly a police get a hand of these materials. how do you feel? would you still want to backpack in China?
