What to Pack for China With Kids (Our 2026 Packing List)

Our China packing list with kids came down to one lesson: when you change cities every couple of days, you have to keep moving everything you packed. We traveled through Beijing, Zhangjiajie, Xi’an, and Shanghai in July with our 6-year-old.

Here’s what earned its space in our bags, what we overpacked, and what we’d do differently on another multi-city China trip.

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China Packing List With Kids: What Earned Space in Our Bags.

For medicines, pack what your family normally uses, and check any medication rules before you travel.

The Items That Mattered Most

Compression bags. They saved space, but the bigger win was organization. We repacked constantly between cities, and keeping clothes compressed and separated made that much easier.

Portable fan. At the Great Wall in July, the heat and lack of shade made a small fan for our daughter worth every inch of bag space. She loved it, especially once she noticed other kids using fans too while we stood in a long queue. Here’s more on sleeping on the Great Wall.

Her swimsuit. It’s easy to skip if swimming isn’t on the itinerary, but having it ready meant she could swim whenever our hotel had a pool. It takes almost no room, so we’d pack it even with no swimming planned.

Kid tablet. We loaded it with educational apps, which made the screen time easier to justify on a trip we wanted to be a learning experience for her. She didn’t need it constantly, but it helped on flights and long waits.

Snacks and activities within reach. We kept snacks, printed activities, and simple learning materials in an easy-to-grab spot. Anything meant to keep a kid busy during a transfer is useless at the bottom of a suitcase.

Riding luggage. Our daughter could sit on our riding suitcase, and that helped more than we expected. Long airport walks were much easier when she could ride instead of walking the whole terminal.

What We Overpacked: Six Pieces of Luggage

China was one stop on a longer world trip. We left some luggage in the Philippines before flying in, and still had six pieces to move through four Chinese cities. Since we’d packed for a month, we had more than enough clothes for nine nights in China.

The bags were fine on our international flights. Our award tickets included one checked bag each, so we only paid excess baggage fees on domestic flights in China, and those were cheap. The trouble started once we were flying between cities inside China. More bags meant more to move, track, and reorganize, and most nights we were rearranging again before the next flight.

Next time, we’d leave more behind at an earlier stop before the China leg. Everything useful on this list would still come with us. We share more about that in what we’d do differently on our China trip with a young child.

Check Your Power Bank Before Flying Within China

Since June 28, 2025, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has banned power banks on domestic flights if they lack a clear CCC/3C certification mark or come from recalled models or batches.

A compliant power bank is still worth bringing, since you’ll rely on your phone constantly. Check the mark on yours before you go, and confirm current CAAC and airline rules. One that passed on your international flight can still be rejected on a domestic one. We learned how few charging spots there are when we spent a night at Beijing airport.

Set Up Your Phone Before You Go

Phone setup isn’t technically packing, but it belongs on the same checklist. We sorted out our SIM/eSIM and downloaded the apps we expected to need before entering China, so we didn’t spend our first day figuring it out. Payments were the exception: WeChat gave us trouble at first, and Alipay never worked for us. Our guides cover how we got internet in China and how to pay in China as a foreigner.

Final Take

We’d pack every item on this list again. We’d just carry them in fewer bags.

For the rest of your planning, start with our China Travel Guide and our nine-night China itinerary with kids.