eSIM for China

China is the exception to how travel eSIMs normally work, and it is worth understanding before you buy. The three national carriers — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — do not sell eSIM service for phones. Their eSIM products are limited to wearables such as smartwatches with paired-number service, not handsets. What a visitor buys instead is a China plan from a carrier based outside the country, which then connects through international roaming onto one of those partner networks. That single fact explains most of what follows: the plan works the moment you land, and the carrier you bought from, not a Chinese operator, is who handles your support. Coverage itself is rarely the constraint. 4G reaches far beyond the big cities, 5G is well established in the major cities and along the main high-speed rail corridors, and signal on intercity high-speed trains is generally continuous enough for messaging and browsing, with brief interruptions in tunnels. In genuinely remote areas, expect 4G rather than 5G. One thing a foreign eSIM does not change is that several overseas internet services are not directly reachable from inside mainland China — that is a property of the network, not of your plan, and it applies to hotel wifi and local connections in exactly the same way.