Our Editorial Process

Last reviewed: May 2026.

Who we are

Local Travelling China is an English-language publication covering travel, culture, and daily-life subjects for foreigners visiting or living in mainland China. The site is published by Helmo Solutions Ltd (UK Companies House registration #16453069) and edited from Guangzhou, China. Posts are bylined to a named editor — see Antoine’s bio for the editorial role.

Why one named editor

Editorial accountability sits with a named editor so readers know who reviewed what. The publication banner stays consistent across the corpus, but every claim on this site has a single editorial owner.

Our team

The editorial desk is run by Antoine, based in Guangzhou since post-COVID. Contributing researchers across mainland China and Hong Kong supply on-the-ground verification — current visa rules at consulates, payment-app behaviour at checkouts, scenic-area access changes. All contributions pass through Antoine before publication.

Sources

Every post on a Your-Money-Your-Life topic (visa, payments, health, safety, money, insurance, customs, transport) carries an explicit Sources block at the bottom with at least three outbound links. Sources are ranked in this order of preference:

1. Government and embassy sources (gov.uk, travel.state.gov, customs.gov.cn, en.nia.gov.cn)
2. Official operator sites (visaforchina.cn, Alipay, China Railway)
3. Established media reporting (China Daily, South China Morning Post, BBC, AP, Reuters)
4. Established research bodies (UNESCO, WHO, Citizen Lab, Freedom House)

We don’t cite aggregator blogs, content-farm guides, or unverifiable forum posts as primary sources.

Fact-check and review cadence

Every post is reviewed against current source material on a published cadence:

Post type	Review cadence
Visa rules and entry requirements	Monthly
Payment apps, banking, foreign-card linking	Monthly
Transit, train, and driving	Quarterly
Customs and prohibited items	Quarterly
Destinations and itineraries	Quarterly to twice yearly
Cultural and historical context	Twice yearly
Food and lifestyle	Twice yearly

Each post carries a visible “Last reviewed by an LTC editor in [Month YYYY]” line in the opening paragraph, and a machine-readable dateModified field in the JSON-LD structured data. Both values reflect the most recent editorial review, not just any save.

How we use AI in our workflow

We are transparent about machine assistance. AI tools take on specific bounded jobs in our pipeline:

• Research aggregation — Drafting initial source lists and summarising multiple cited documents.
• Draft generation — First-pass outlines and rough drafts on evergreen topics that an editor then rewrites.
• Image alt-text — Bulk generation of descriptive alt-text for accessibility and image-search indexing.
• Quality control — Spotting voice inconsistencies, missing metadata, and stale dates across the corpus.

What stays human:

• Final fact-checks on every YMYL claim
• Source selection and quality ranking
• Editorial voice, tone, and brand consistency
• The “Last reviewed” stamp — which is only set when an editor has actually verified the post

We don’t publish AI-generated copy that hasn’t been read and edited by a person.

Corrections

If a post on this site contains a factual error, a stale rule, a broken link, or an outdated price, please email antoine@helmo-solutions.com with the URL and the issue. We commit to:

• Acknowledging legitimate corrections within five working days
• Publishing a visible correction note at the top of the affected post
• Updating the dateModified stamp and refreshing the Sources block
• Logging the correction in our editorial record

We don’t silently overwrite contested claims.

What we don’t do

• No sponsored content disguised as editorial. Sponsored posts are marked at the top.
• No affiliate links inside the body of an article. Affiliate disclosures, when applicable, sit in a dedicated sidebar or footer block, never in flowing prose.
• No paid review-removal services or pay-to-publish guest posts.