Is China Actually Safe to Live In?

The short answer: yes. By every available measure, China is one of the safer countries to live in. Gallup scores China 93 out of 100 on its Law and Order Index, against a global average of 83, and the Ministry of Public Security reported criminal cases down 16.5% year on year in the first half of 2026. Street safety rarely catches new arrivals out.

It is the question almost nobody asks out loud, and almost everybody thinks about. You can research visas for months and still have a quiet, unexamined worry sitting underneath the whole plan: will I actually be safe there?

The honest answer is that this is the easiest of your worries to put down, and the internet is unusually bad at telling you so. Search “is China safe” and you will get page after page written for someone spending eleven days on a tour bus. Pickpockets at the Bund. Taxi scams. Tea-house tricks. Useful if you are visiting. Almost irrelevant if you are signing a two-year lease.

So here is the same question, answered for someone who is moving.

What the independent data says

The most credible non-Chinese measurement is Gallup’s Law and Order Index, which surveys around a thousand people in each of 144 countries and asks four plain questions: do you feel safe walking alone at night where you live, do you have confidence in your local police, have you or another household member had money or property stolen in the past 12 months, and have you been assaulted or mugged in the past 12 months.

China scores 93 out of 100 in the most recent edition, published in 2025 from 2024 fieldwork. The global average is 83. That places China among the highest-scoring countries in the world, alongside the ones people normally name when they are asked to picture somewhere safe.

That is survey data rather than government data, and it measures perception as much as incidence. But it is the closest thing to an apples-to-apples international comparison that exists, and it is not flattering by accident.

What the 2026 official figures add

Chinese official figures point in the same direction and add recency. The Ministry of Public Security, reported by Xinhua in July 2026, gave these figures for the first half of 2026:

• Criminal cases filed fell 16.5% year on year, and public security violations fell 11.3%.
• Theft, robbery and fraud cases totaled 307,000, down 38.9% from a year earlier.

People’s Daily Online adds the perception measure: Chinese citizens’ reported sense of security reached 98.2% in 2025, staying above 98% for a sixth consecutive year.

Treat these as what they are: official statistics from the government that collects them. We are not going to pretend they carry the same independence as the Gallup number. What makes them worth citing is that they move in the same direction as the independent measure, over a period long enough to be a trend rather than a good quarter.

And the number that is hardest to argue with

People are voting with their feet. China recorded 22.91 million inbound foreign visits in the first half of 2026, up 20.4% year on year, according to People’s Daily Online. More than 17.8 million of those entries were visa-free, which is 77.7% of all foreign arrivals, on National Immigration Administration figures reported by Xinhua.

Movement on that scale is not what a genuinely unsafe country produces. It is the most useful data point in this article, because it is the one nobody had to interpret.

The honest caveats

Three, and we would rather you heard them from us.

A national number is not your street. China is the size of a continent. “Safe” describes the country in aggregate. It does not describe a specific neighborhood on a specific night, and no index ever will. If you are weighing cities against each other, our Tier-1 city comparison is a better tool than any national figure.

Safe is not the same as easy. Almost everyone we work with finds that the genuine friction of the first six months has nothing to do with crime. It is administrative: registering your address correctly, getting a bank account that talks to your phone, working out which of your documents needs notarizing and translating, and doing all of it in a language you are still learning. That is the part worth preparing for, and our notes on residence registration and the candid version of the first year cover what to expect.

Petty crime still exists. Low is not zero. Ordinary precautions remain ordinary precautions, in Shanghai as in Lisbon.

What this actually means for your plan

If safety was the thing holding the decision, the data says you can take it off the list and spend that attention on the question that genuinely determines whether the move works: what is your legal basis for staying?

That is the part with real complexity, real variation between cities, and real consequences for getting it wrong. It is also the part we do. Start with the temporary residence permit routes, look at the retirement route if you are past working age, and read up on permanent residence if you are thinking in decades rather than years.

Safety, it turns out, is one of the things China quietly gets right. The paperwork is where you will want the help.