Guidelines for traveller stories.
We want first-hand accounts. We also have a name to protect: honest, careful, and not a dumping ground. Please read this before you send anything.
What we look for
- A first-hand story from a trip in China (or a crossing into China), written in your own words.
- Photographs you took, or a public video you made, with a link. We prefer a sentence of context for each.
- Useful, specific detail — a station name, a time of day, a price you actually paid — over a general rave or a general complaint.
- Corrections to our own guides, with a source or a dated observation. We are grateful for those.
What we will not publish
- Anything you did not write or take, including material copied from another site, and including a review you were paid or pressured to invent.
- Hate, harassment, sexual content, or anything involving a child in a way that is not a straightforward family-travel account with a guardian’s consent.
- Defamation, medical advice presented as fact, or a political campaign piece. A personal observation is fine; a smear is not.
- Spam, promotional copy, affiliate dumps, or a list of ‘secret clubs’ you have not actually been to.
- Precise information that would help someone break a law, evade immigration rules, or harm a person. We will also decline anything we simply cannot verify and are not willing to stand behind.
How we moderate
Every submission is read by a person. We may edit for length, clarity, spelling and house style, and we may cut a passage we cannot stand behind. We may decline without a long explanation. We keep a record of what we received for a reasonable period, and we will delete a published story if you ask and we can reasonably do so, or if we discover a problem. Published stories are labelled as traveller submissions, with your credit, and are distinct from our own reporting.
Rights and privacy
By submitting, you confirm you are 18 or older, the work is yours to share, and people who are clearly identifiable in a photo have agreed to it being sent to us (or are not the subject in a private setting). You grant Honestly China a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to publish, lightly edit, and display the work on this website and in our related editorial channels, with credit to the name you give us. You keep the copyright. We will use your email only to follow up about the submission, unless you also ask to join the newsletter. We will not sell your details. This is a draft legal position, and it may be tightened by a lawyer before the form is connected.
Questions about a submission, or a request to take a published story down, can go through our contact page. Contact · Ask us →