Customer Reviews

Fodor's China, 2nd Edition: Expert Advice and Smart Choices: Where to Stay, Eat, and Explore On and Off the Beaten Path (Fodor's Gold Guides)

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I recently traveled in China with Fodor's China. My travel companion had the Lonely Planet. China is not an easy country to get around in, but we found that Fodor's guide was more useful, easier to consult, well organized, and up-to-date. The Lonely Planet was not as well organized and not as updated. If you are planning a trip to China, I highly recommend this entertaining and useful guide.

I am currently in China, after reading a review on Amazon decided to buy Fodor's instead of lonely planet, am sorry I did. The information in the book is of value if you are with a tour, or planning the overall itenerary but it is not to helpful when it comes to details. Most of the hotels and such are for the more upscale traveler, with out much for the budget or midrange traveler, I ended up borrowing Let's go China from a traveler who was leaving and I ask others I meet who have the lonely planet if I can read a bit. Also another problem is there are no chinese characters in the text, so you can't show the taxi driver where you want to go, and most haven't mastered reading the romanized chinese with the proper accent or inflection. If you are with a tour, maybe fodors is OK, but otherwise go with LP, it has picture too, Fodor's dosen't.

I am an American student currently studying in China. I've been here for more than 6 months already and have done a fair amount of traveling, and have found this book to be of almost no help. The most important reason is that there are no Chinese characters anywhere in the book (which are necessary if you can't speak the language, because then you can at least point them out to chinese people who can then help you), and the pinyin romanization of the place names, which would ordinarily provide at least a way to communicate your destination to cab drivers, bus drivers, or whoever else, don't include any tone marks, making them useless to anyone not already intimately familiar with the location described. This effectively makes the book useless to anyone who is not fluent in both English and Chinese (who would be able to read the English description and then describe the destination in Chinese to a Chinese person). Also, the prices listed for food and lodging are unreasonably high. The lowest priced Beijing hotel listed is $75 US. This is absolutely ridiculous, as it is very easy to find hotels at less than half that price that are 3 stars or above, with western bathrooms, a/c, etc. Anyone using this guide to find places to eat and sleep will spend far more money than necessary. These are the most important reasons (out of many) why I cannot recommend this book to anyone. The only positive aspect of this book that I can think of is that it makes for interesting reading for anyone planning to go to China in the future. As a travel reference book, however, it is a complete failure. The book that I now use and that almost all of my classmates also use is the Lonely Planet. It succeeds in almost every place that Fodors fails. Although it isn't perfect, and in China, where things change fast, keeping updated is difficult, the Lonely Planet is still the best reference to have while traveling.

Though an adequate guide for the general tourist, Fodor's excels as a business person's guide. The 'Doing Business in China' section in this guide, though brief, is excellent. Also the Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong sections are very good. Also helpful, Fodor has various proposed itineraries for several cities and regions found throughout the book.

I am a firm believer that any guide book worth its salt has to guide you with both words and quality maps. This guide has excellent dining and lodging maps for Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong but sadly stops there. Fodor's other regional maps are very helpful and the city maps clearly show you sites to visit.

Twenty writers have collectively compiled what amounts to a travel compendium on China. Thus the information can vary in helpfulness and accuracy. The chapter on Southwestern China, which includes a scant section on the Three Gorge Dam, states, "that when completed the dam is intended to supply one third of the nation's electrical power". One third!? If this were true (not) that would be more than would be equivalent to 35 nuclear reactors or nearly 70,000 megawatts of electricity. Closer reliable estimates place the projected output to 10% of China’s electrical power.

Insensitive and politically incorrect, Fodor includes the Republic of Mongolia in its guide for China! That would be like a guide on Florida including Cuba; offensive to any nation’s pride. Also irritating are the unwanted insertions of hard page advertisement for banks, calling cards and travel services. The purchase price of $... is more than enough for Fodor's to make a profit but it chooses to afflict its readers with protruding advertising to increase its profits. NOT!

Even though this guide has a 2000 publishing date there is no Internet information. No list of cyber cafes and no website or email address for accommodations, even though most major hotels are Internet connected. And finally, there is no Chinese characters in the book, thus when you need to use a taxi there is nothing to point to as 99.9% of the taxi drivers speak zero English.

Basically, this guide would be adequate for a person with a large tour group or a business person visiting Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong, but there are better guides out for the general traveler (see my reviews of Lonely Planet China or Rough Guide China). Conditionally Recommended

I recently spent some time in China and happened to have a Fodor's China guide with me. It was extremely informative and quite helpful at times. However, it has one major flaw - the place names of the sites, restaurants, and hotels are written only in English. In order for the average taxi driver to understand where you would like to go, you need to have the name of the place written in Mandarin characters (just in case your heavily accented attempt to speak the language is incomprehensible to the driver). The largest obstacle in a foreign country is always the language barrier. If the guide had the place names written in Mandarin, it would be golden. As is though, it is still worth the money and time to buy and read.