Driving in China as a Foreigner

The licence

Start with the part that trips everyone: an international driving permit is not valid in mainland China. It doesn’t matter what the rental desk says, or what a consulate website implies. China isn’t party to the relevant convention, and an IDP has no legal standing here.

What you need is a Chinese licence, and there are two routes.

Conversion. If you hold a valid licence from home, you can convert it. In Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and other large cities the process is well-trodden: a certified translation of your licence, a basic medical check (essentially an eyesight test), passport copies and your residence document. The only exam is a multiple-choice theory test, available in English, mostly covering signage and right-of-way. An evening with the practice questions is usually enough.

Temporary permit. For short visits, a temporary driving permit valid for up to three months is the practical option. Several major airports — Beijing Capital and Shanghai Pudong among them — issue them on the spot against your passport, visa and a translation of your home licence. It isn’t available everywhere, but for a self-drive holiday it’s exactly the right instrument.

Renting

Hertz, Avis and eHi operate in most large cities, and domestic platforms like Zuzuche specialise in renting to foreign drivers with translation and insurance support.

Expect friction anyway. Some branches rarely see a foreign permit and will need to phone someone; deposits can be high; and the car you booked isn’t always the class you get. None of it is a dealbreaker, but leave an hour rather than twenty minutes.

Buying is only realistic if you live here — registration, plates (rationed by quota in the big cities) and a residence permit make it a project rather than an errand.

What it’s actually like

The first hour feels like managed chaos. Lane markings read as advisory. The horn is a communication channel rather than a rebuke. Scooters materialise from angles that shouldn’t exist, and pedestrians cross on a personal risk assessment. Then the underlying logic surfaces, and it turns out everyone is negotiating rather than competing.

City driving in a megacity — Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing — is stressful and rarely worth it when the metro exists. Get out of town and it inverts completely: newly surfaced expressways, tunnels through mountain ranges, switchbacks over 4,000 m passes, and back roads through tea terraces and villages with bilingual signage most of the way. The road network is among the best anywhere, and the remote parts of it are startlingly good.

Enforcement

Take this seriously. Cameras are everywhere — speed, lane discipline, red lights, phone use — and fines are issued automatically against the licence number. Small county towns have them too.

• Expressways: usually 120 km/h
• Secondary roads: 60–80 km/h
• Urban: 40 km/h, often lower near schools
• Zebra crossings: stop. Failure to yield is penalised hard.

Drink-driving is effectively zero tolerance. Breath checks are routine and unannounced, and a single beer can end your licence and your trip.

Practical notes

Navigation — Amap or Baidu Maps, both switchable to English in settings. Google Maps’ China data is years old and will route you into roads that no longer exist.

Tolls — frequent on expressways. Keep a card or cash accessible; some booths still won’t take a phone.

Fuel — stations are common and full-service; an attendant pumps for you, and you pay at the window or by QR code.

Parking — garages and parking apps in cities. In villages, someone will wave you into a spot for a few yuan, and that’s the system working as intended.

Language — a translation app earns its keep at rental desks and police checkpoints more than anywhere else.

Why bother

Because public transport, excellent as it is, runs to a timetable, and the best things about rural China don’t.

With a car you can stop at the village that looked interesting from the road, take the pass instead of the tunnel, and reach the places bus routes were never drawn for — western Sichuan’s valleys, the Inner Mongolian grasslands, the back roads of northwest Yunnan. The trip stops being a sequence of destinations and becomes a route.

That’s the real argument for the paperwork. The dots on the map are easy to reach by train. The distance between them is where the travelling happens.