Last updated · 8 July 2026
Editorial scope
CathayGuide publishes practical China travel guidance for short-term visitors. The highest-risk claims on the site involve entry permission, hotel registration, payment access, connectivity, transport and safety. Those claims are handled with a stricter source standard than purely descriptive city writing.
Source hierarchy
We separate sources by what they can prove. A ministry page can prove a rule exists; a provider page can prove a product claim; a traveller report can flag a practical problem but cannot override an official rule.
Government and authority pages: immigration notices, embassy or consulate guidance, railway authority pages, official emergency-number guidance and published law or regulation.
Provider documentation: payment apps, eSIM operators, VPN providers, booking platforms, transport apps and ticketing platforms describing their own current product.
Field evidence: current screenshots, reader reports, repeated trip experience and observed app flows. These can qualify advice but are labelled as practical evidence.
Unattributed forum claims, copied travel-blog summaries, AI-generated answers and screenshots without date or context are not used as proof for rule-heavy claims.
Claim tests before publication
Every practical statement has to pass the test for its claim type. This keeps a city recommendation, a visa sentence and an affiliate product link from being judged by the same loose standard.
Must point to an authority, law, government notice, embassy page or named official process. Practical reports can explain friction, not replace the rule.
Must be checked against the provider that controls the flow: payment app, eSIM marketplace, booking platform, railway app, hotel platform or VPN provider.
Must be grounded in time, distance, queues, transfer friction and what a first-time visitor can reasonably do without local help.
Must still make sense if no commission existed. The page must disclose the relationship close enough for the reader to notice before buying.
Dating & updates
Visible page dates are changed when a meaningful check has happened, not just because a build ran. Review frequency depends on the topic:
Visa, entry, payments, VPN/eSIM and hotel-registration pages are re-checked when a policy or provider flow changes, and during scheduled reviews.
Transport, city logistics and booking pages are revisited for seasonal, route, platform or inventory changes.
Culture, etiquette and background pages are reviewed when reader corrections, source changes or major travel-pattern changes justify it.
Corrections
Corrections are triaged by impact. A typo is fixed quietly. A changed visa condition, payment limit, hotel-registration rule or safety instruction triggers a page update, date change and source-note review. Send corrections through the corrections page with the page URL, claim and source.
Capture URL, claim, city or provider, date seen, screenshot/source if supplied.
Check the strongest available source first, then provider docs or reproducible app flow when the rule is operational.
Rewrite the affected sentence or section, not just the FAQ answer, so the page does not contradict itself.
Change the visible modified date only when the reader-facing advice or source basis changed materially.
Commercial independence
Commercial relationships are handled after the editorial decision. A provider can be linked only if it fits the page's practical recommendation; commission availability is not a ranking factor.
Commercial links are marked with sponsored or affiliate attributes where appropriate, and pages that contain them include a plain-language disclosure near the relevant recommendation.
We avoid display advertising on firewall-focused pages because the subject conflicts with common ad-network policies and would make the recommendation environment less clear.
What we don't do
- We do not use AI output as a factual source.
- We do not change a visible update date for cosmetic edits alone.
- We do not claim first-hand testing when a statement is based on provider documentation or reader evidence.
- We do not ask readers for passport numbers, booking references or payment details through CathayGuide.
Automatic rejection rules
Some evidence is useful as a lead, but not enough to publish a rule or recommendation. These are rejected unless a stronger source is found:
- No anonymous AI summaries as proof for rules, prices or eligibility.
- No single undated forum post as the basis for entry, payment or safety advice.
- No provider marketing copy as proof that a competing provider fails.
- No affiliate ranking change without a practical reason visible on the page.
Questions
For who writes the site, see authors. For site scope and funding, see about CathayGuide. For a specific correction, use the editorial contact page.