China charges more electric cars than the rest of the world combined, and it does so on its own plug standard, its own payment rails and, in one corner of the market, on a system that does not charge the battery at all but replaces it.
The plugs: GB/T 20234
China's connector family is the GB/T 20234 series, a mandatory national standard rather than a manufacturer's design. It has two shapes.
AC (slow) charging. A seven-pin connector: protective earth, three line phases, neutral, and two signalling pins — CC for confirming the plug is seated and CP for the control pilot. It is rated to 440 V and 63 A. This is what a home wallbox and most kerbside posts use.
DC (fast) charging. A nine-pin connector, distinguishable at a glance by its round face with a flattened top. Four of the nine pins are signal pins: CC1 and CC2 for charging confirmation, S+ and S- for CAN bus communication. Common Chinese DC posts run at 750 V and up to 250 A.
The superficial resemblance to the European Type 2 plug is misleading: the pin functions differ and the two are not interchangeable. Nor does a GB/T car accept CCS, CHAdeMO or NACS without an adapter.
The general-requirements part of the standard was revised as GB/T 20234.1-2023, superseding the 2015 edition. Alongside it, the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration approved and released three standards for ChaoJi-1 on 12 September 2023 — a next-generation DC interface, including GB/T 20234.4-2023 for high-power DC charging, designed to reach roughly 1.2 MW at 1,500 V and 800 A and to remain backward-compatible with the existing GB/T DC connector through an adapter. ChaoJi was developed jointly with Japan's CHAdeMO organisation.
How big the network is
Two bodies publish numbers and they count slightly differently. Both are worth knowing.
| Source | Date | Total charging facilities | Public | Private |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National Energy Administration | end-2025 | 20.092 million | not broken out | not broken out |
| EVCIPA (industry alliance) | end-February 2026 | 21.01 million | 4.834 million | 16.176 million |
The NEA also reported that the network took eighteen months to double from 10 million to 20 million units during 2025, that the average power of a public charger rose 33% year on year to 46.5 kW, and that nineteen provincial-level regions now have charging in every township. A three-year infrastructure programme introduced in October 2025 targets 28 million charging points by the end of 2027.
Highways. The NEA reported 71,500 chargers installed at expressway service areas, covering more than 98% of them. This is the figure that changes a long Chinese road trip from an exercise in planning into an ordinary drive, and it is why Chinese expressway service areas — 服务区 (fúwùqū, "foo-WOO-chü") — often have more charging bays than fuel pumps.
Who operates the chargers
Public charging in China is concentrated. Commercial research on the 2026 market puts TELD (特来电, Tèláidiàn) at about 807,000 chargers, Star Charge (星星充电, Xīngxīng Chōngdiàn) at 703,000 and YKC (云快充, Yún Kuài Chōng — "cloud fast charge") at 656,000, with the top fifteen operators holding roughly 84% of public charging between them. State Grid (国家电网) and China Southern Power Grid anchor the highway corridors using their own transmission assets, and vehicle makers run their own branded networks alongside — Tesla's Supercharger network in China uses GB/T connectors, and NIO, Xpeng, Li Auto and others operate their own posts.
The practical consequence for a driver is that no single app covers everything. Most Chinese EV owners keep two or three operator mini-programs, or use an aggregator inside a map app.
Battery swapping
Swapping — 换电 (huàndiàn, "hwahn-DYEN") — replaces a depleted pack with a charged one, in a station, in minutes.
NIO is the largest operator. The company announced on 6 February 2026 that it had completed its hundred-millionth battery swap, across 3,790 Power Swap Stations, of which 1,020 sit on Chinese highways; it puts the average swap at about three minutes and said it planned to add a further 1,000 stations during 2026.
CATL, the battery maker, launched a swap brand called EVOGO in January 2022 and has since built out a network branded Choco-SEB. CnEVPost reported that it passed 2,000 stations on 1 July 2026, covering 180 cities across 31 provinces, with a target of 3,000 by the end of the year and an average of more than 200 new stations a month during the second quarter.
Aulton (奥动新能源) is the third significant name, and takes a different approach: its Hong Kong IPO filing showed 531 stations connected to its platform as of 30 April 2026, of which only 214 were self-owned and 317 belonged to third parties, as the company shifted toward selling equipment and operating other people's stations.
Swapping is not a universal alternative. It works only for models designed around a standardised pack, and it is concentrated in taxi and ride-hailing fleets, heavy trucks and NIO's own customer base.
How payment works
Charging in China is paid for through a phone, not a card reader.
The normal flow is: scan the QR code on the charging post with Alipay or WeChat, which opens the operator's mini-program; confirm the connector number; start the session; pay from the app balance when it ends. Tariffs are usually a per-kWh electricity charge plus a per-kWh service fee, and both vary by time of day.
For visitors, the relevant change came in July 2023, when WeChat Pay (20 July) and Alipay (21 July) both began accepting international bank cards bound directly to the wallet. The State Council published a consolidated payment guide for overseas visitors on 11 April 2024, following a People's Bank of China circular, which raised the single-transaction cap for foreign visitors from US$1,000 to US$5,000 and the annual cumulative cap from US$10,000 to US$50,000, and required three-star-and-above hotels and top-rated tourist attractions to accept overseas bank cards. UnionPay cards work at merchant terminals.
What still does not work reliably: inserting or tapping a foreign contactless card at a charging post itself. Assume the phone is the payment method.
Home charging, plates and the green plate
Most Chinese charging is private: 16.176 million of the 21.01 million units counted at the end of February 2026. A wallbox is normally installed by the car maker as part of the purchase, but it depends on having a fixed parking space and the agreement of the property management company — the binding constraint in dense city housing, and the reason public and shared charging matters more in China than in a suburban market.
Electric and other new energy cars carry a distinct plate. The Ministry of Public Security announced the 新能源汽车专用号牌 (xīnnéngyuán qìchē zhuānyòng hàopái, "shin-NUNG-ywen chee-chuh jwahn-yoong how-pie") — dedicated new energy vehicle plate — on 21 November 2016, and issue began on 1 December 2016 in five pilot cities: Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuxi, Jinan and Shenzhen. It went nationwide during 2018. The plate is gradient green, slightly wider than a standard plate, and carries eight characters instead of seven: the province character, the city letter, then six alphanumerics in which D marks a battery-electric vehicle and F other new energy types.
The green plate is not only cosmetic. In the cities that cap registrations it is the plate that is easier — or free — to obtain, and in several cities it is exempt from the weekday driving restrictions that apply to conventional plates.