Getting a car in a Chinese city is easy, cheap and almost entirely done through a phone. There are three layers to it — the traditional metered taxi, the licensed ride-hailing platforms, and a growing number of driverless services — and a visitor can use all three.
Ride-hailing is a licensed industry
China regulates ride-hailing as a transport business rather than as a technology platform. A company needs an operating permit; each driver needs a driver's certificate; each car needs a vehicle transport certificate. The Ministry of Transport runs a national regulatory information exchange system and publishes monthly figures from it.
The May 2026 release records:
- 400 licensed ride-hailing platform companies nationwide as of 31 May 2026, one more than the previous month. For scale, the State Council reported 318 as of 30 June 2023.
- 977 million orders placed in May 2026 through the system.
- 286 million of those completed through aggregator platforms.
The Ministry also publishes per-platform compliance rates — the share of a platform's orders where both driver and vehicle held valid certificates — which is why compliance, not just price, is a competitive issue between operators.
DiDi
滴滴 (Dīdī, "DEE-dee") — DiDi Chuxing — is the dominant platform. Its own results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025 report:
| Metric | Q4 2025 | Full year 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Core platform orders | 4.844 billion (+13.5% year on year) | 18.24 billion (+14%) |
| Core platform GTV | CNY 123.8 billion (+19.9%) | CNY 450.8 billion (+14.8%) |
| China Mobility orders | 3.578 billion, averaging 38.9 million a day | 13.735 billion (+10.8%) |
| China Mobility GTV | CNY 87.2 billion (+11.2%) | CNY 333.8 billion (+10.7%) |
DiDi described the quarter as its twelfth consecutive quarter of double-digit order growth in China Mobility, and reported a single-day order peak above 65 million across the core platform.
The company's product range inside China is wider than a Western reader might expect: 快车 (kuàichē, "kwye-CHUH") economy rides, 专车 (zhuānchē, "jwahn-CHUH") premium, hailing a licensed taxi through the app, carpooling, designated-driver services for people who have been drinking, and inter-city routes.
The aggregators, and everyone else
The most important structural change in Chinese ride-hailing is the aggregator. Amap — 高德地图 (Gāodé Dìtú, "gaow-DUH DEE-too"), Alibaba's map app — lets a user enter a destination and see prices, car classes and waiting times from several operators simultaneously, then books through whichever is chosen. Aggregated bookings rose from about 10.9% of the market in 2020 to roughly 32.5% in 2025 on one industry estimate, and smaller platforms have become heavily dependent on them: T3's share of orders arriving via aggregators reached 85.9% in the most recent year reported.
The named operators worth knowing:
- Cao Cao Mobility (曹操出行, Cáocāo Chūxíng) — backed by Geely, listed in Hong Kong, and built around its own fleet of purpose-made electric cars.
- T3 Chuxing (T3出行) — a joint venture backed by the three central state automotive groups FAW, Dongfeng and Changan.
- Meituan Dache (美团打车) — the ride arm of the food-delivery and local-services group.
- Shouqi (首汽约车), Ruqi (如祺出行, GAC-linked) and dozens of regional platforms, most of which reach passengers through Amap rather than their own apps.
Traditional taxis
The metered taxi — 出租车 (chūzūchē, "choo-DZOO-chuh") — has not disappeared. Licensed taxis are metered, with a flag-fall covering the first few kilometres, then a per-kilometre rate, a low-speed or waiting surcharge, and a night surcharge. Beijing's flag-fall covers the first 3 km at ¥13; Shanghai's opens in the ¥12 to ¥14 range. Tariffs are set by municipal price authorities, so they differ from city to city, and smaller cities can open at ¥5 to ¥8.
There is no national taxi colour scheme. Livery is decided city by city and, within a city, by operating company: Beijing's fleet is largely two-tone, Shanghai's is colour-coded by operator, and other cities use single colours entirely of their own choosing. What is consistent is the roof light and the illuminated windscreen sign, which shows when the car is free. What is also consistent is the plate itself: commercial passenger vehicles carry a yellow plate with black characters when they exceed the size threshold, while ordinary saloon taxis normally carry the same blue plate as a private car, or a green NEV plate if electric — so the plate colour is a poor way to identify a taxi.
Hailing on the street still works, but in the big cities most taxis are dispatched through an app, and cash is accepted less and less often — one reason the State Council's April 2024 payment guide for overseas visitors specifically pushed transport operators to keep accepting cash and to take overseas bank cards.
How a visitor pays
The practical route for someone without a Chinese bank account:
- Install Alipay or WeChat before arriving and bind an international Visa or Mastercard. Both wallets have supported direct international card binding since July 2023.
- Open the DiDi mini-program inside the wallet rather than downloading DiDi separately. The mini-programs offer an English interface and are set up for foreign cards.
- Alternatively use Amap's in-app hailing, which will also surface non-DiDi operators.
The State Council's April 2024 guide raised the single-transaction cap for overseas 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 attractions to accept overseas bank cards. UnionPay cards work at merchant terminals. A foreign contactless card tapped directly at a Chinese taxi terminal generally will not.
Robotaxis
China has moved driverless ride-hailing out of the demonstration stage in defined city zones. All figures below come from the operating companies.
Baidu Apollo Go (萝卜快跑, Luóbo Kuàipǎo — "radish runs fast") is the largest. Baidu reported 3.4 million fully driverless rides in the fourth quarter of 2025, growth of more than 200% year on year, and a weekly peak above 300,000 trips. Cumulative rides to the public passed 20 million by February 2026, across 26 cities worldwide, with more than 300 million autonomous kilometres driven, of which over 190 million were fully driverless. Wuhan is the largest single deployment, with more than a thousand vehicles operating without a safety driver — the reason Wuhan, rather than Beijing or Shanghai, is where most people have their first robotaxi ride.
Pony.ai (小马智行) announced in November 2025 that it had begun fully driverless commercial services with its seventh-generation vehicles across Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing, and describes itself as the only company holding fully driverless commercial robotaxi permits in all four tier-one cities. Its fleet reached 1,975 robotaxis as of 30 June 2026, against a raised end-2026 target of 3,500.
WeRide (文远知行) had expanded its domestic robotaxi fleet to about 1,000 vehicles by the end of April 2026.
Robotaxis operate inside geo-fenced service areas, are ordered through their own apps or through Apollo Go's mini-program, and price below a human-driven ride in most of the cities where they run. They are a real transport option in parts of Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Beijing, and a novelty ride nearly everywhere else.