Terms of Service

1. These terms and who you are agreeing with

Paralight (paralight.fun, “we”, “us”, “the site”) is operated by Shanghai ParaLight Information Technology Co., Ltd. (registered address: Room 302-59, 3F, Building 1, No. 1107 Yuyuan Road, Changning District, Shanghai, China; company registration number: 91310105MAEXYNBK4K).

By visiting the site, creating an account, or buying a Paralight Pass, you agree to these Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, which form part of them. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.

If you are using Paralight on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for it.

2. What Paralight is

Paralight is an information and decision platform that helps you work out where in China to go and what life there is actually like. We provide place profiles (structured facts, editorial writing and AI-assisted synthesis, sourced and dated wherever we can), AI search, trip planning tools, arrival guides and themed routes, plus collections and saving features.

Parts of the site are generated or synthesised with AI assistance and are labelled as such on the page, as required by the Chinese labelling rules for AI-generated content in force since September 2025. AI synthesis can be wrong and can go stale; official sources prevail.

AI search and AI itinerary planning are open to everyone under a fair-use allowance: unregistered visitors get a small number of free tries, and registered users get a higher daily allowance (as shown in the product). These limits keep the service stable and prevent abuse; they apply only to AI interactions and do not change what content you can access.

3. Information only — not professional advice

Everything on Paralight is general information. It is not legal, visa, immigration, tax, medical, financial or investment advice, and it is no substitute for checking with a qualified professional or the relevant authority.

This matters most for entry and visa information. Visa rules, visa-free and transit-visa-free schemes, port-of-entry policies, accommodation registration requirements, payment and connectivity rules change fast — something accurate today can be obsolete next week. We date every fact we can and re-check continuously, but we cannot guarantee any policy statement is still correct when you read it or when you travel. Before making travel, visa or relocation decisions, verify with your nearest Chinese embassy or consulate, the National Immigration Administration, or another official source.

The same applies to prices, rents, climate, transport and opening hours: these come from public sources, partners and community contributions, change constantly, and are offered for comparison only.

4. Your account

Most of the site is readable without an account. With one, you can save places, mark places you want to go, keep trip plans, and receive email from us. We support passwordless email sign-in links (magic links) and Google sign-in.

• Use a real, working email address, and keep your inbox and devices secure — activity through your account is treated as yours.
• If you think your account has been compromised, tell us via the contact page as soon as you can.
• The site is not intended for children under 14. If you are under 18, use the site and make any purchase only with your parent or guardian’s knowledge and consent.
• You can close your account at any time. What gets deleted and what gets anonymised is described in the Privacy Policy.

5. Content you contribute

Want-to-go marks, saves, corrections, first-hand reports and anything else you submit are “your content”. We care about it a lot — the current, insider, honest layer that machines cannot reach is what makes this platform worth reading. A few ground rules:

Review before publication

Contributions shown publicly are reviewed by us before they go live. We may fix typos and formatting, ask you for a source, or decline to publish. Published content can be taken down at any time if a report or a re-check turns up a problem.

What you must not post

• Anything unlawful under Chinese law or the law where you are;
• Anything that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark, image, reputation or privacy (including reposting other people’s articles or photos without permission);
• False, misleading or fabricated-source content, or content posted for spam, traffic-farming or advertising;
• Hateful, harassing, discriminatory, sexual, violent or otherwise harmful content;
• Other people’s personal information (names, contact details, addresses, itineraries) without their clear consent;
• Automated scraping or bulk copying of the site, or circumventing the paywall, access controls or rate limits.

The licence you give us

You keep ownership of your content. So that we can operate and display it, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence limited to the following uses: storing and showing your content on Paralight; using it in formats derived from the site (PDF exports, pocket cards, share images, on-site recommendations); and translating, adapting or excerpting it for layout and readability. Anything beyond these uses is not licensed by default — including commercial licensing of your content to third parties outside the site, or training third-party models on it. Those require your separate written agreement. The licence ends when your content is removed, except for copies already reasonably quoted elsewhere or already downloaded by others.

If you contribute systematic first-hand field reporting, we may separately invite you to sign a contributor agreement covering attribution, commercial licensing and deletion rights. Until then, this section applies.

Deletion and anonymisation

You can ask us to remove content you posted. Where a contribution has been accepted into the public chain of sourced facts, we will normally strip your attribution and keep the content anonymised rather than erase it, because the provenance of other facts depends on it. Your account and personal data are deleted or anonymised as described in the Privacy Policy.

6. Intellectual property

Our content. Editorial writing, structured datasets, place profiles, routes and guides, interface design, code, and the Paralight name and marks are protected by copyright and trademark law and belong to us or our licensors.

What you may do. Read, print, export PDFs and share links for your own non-commercial use; quote reasonably with attribution and a link back to the page.

What you may not do. Without written permission: copy, resell or redistribute our datasets or substantial portions of the content; use it to train third-party models; scrape it in bulk; or strip out source attributions and AI labels.

Third-party licensed material. Some photographs and data come from the public domain, open licences (such as Wikimedia Commons and Openverse) or licence agreements with third parties, and remain subject to those licence terms. Base maps are provided by Tianditu and OpenFreeMap. Some internal data sources are used only for our own verification and are never redistributed or resold.

Complaints. If you believe something here infringes your rights, tell us via the contact page with the basis of your right, the exact links, and how to reach you. We will look into it promptly.

7. Paralight Pass — digital content purchase terms

The Paralight Pass is the only paid thing on the site: a one-time purchase, valid for life, not a subscription, never auto-renewed. It unlocks the full-depth layer across the site plus PDF and pocket-card exports. The current list price is US$19.9 (promotions, regional pricing and currency movement may change it; a price change never affects a Pass you already bought).

• Digital content, not a physical product. A Pass is access to digital content. It includes no offline service, agency work or one-to-one consulting.
• Tied to your account, not transferable. A Pass cannot be lent, resold or shared between people.
• What “for life” means. No expiry date and no renewal, for as long as the service continues to operate. If we ever shut the service down, we will announce it in advance and give you a reasonable window to export your content.
• Content changes. We keep updating and adding, and we sometimes retire entries that are outdated or disputed. A Pass guarantees access, not the permanence of any single entry.
• Online payment is live. Paralight Pass is billed through a hosted checkout run by our payment processor (Subotiz), accepting international cards and major wallets; card numbers never touch our servers. Membership starts once the purchase completes; for refunds see the Refund Policy. Passes granted manually by us in the backend involve no payment at all.
• Refunds. See the Refund Policy. Where a payment is refunded, reversed or charged back, the corresponding access is withdrawn.

8. Third-party links and affiliate commissions

Some pages — trip plans in particular, where we suggest stays, tickets and transport — link out to third-party platforms. Some of those are affiliate links: if you book through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

Commission does not decide what we write or where we point you; recommendations follow the content, not the payout. Products, prices, terms and after-sales on third-party platforms are their responsibility, not ours, and anything you buy there is governed by that platform’s own terms and privacy policy.

9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The site is provided “as is”. We work hard to keep it accurate, current and traceable, but we make no warranty as to accuracy, completeness, timeliness or fitness for your purpose, and we do not promise uninterrupted or error-free service.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, the site — including delayed or cancelled trips, visa refusals, booking losses, and loss of profit or data.

Our total aggregate liability under these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) what you actually paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) the equivalent of CNY 100 if you have paid us nothing.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, such as personal injury caused by our wilful misconduct or gross negligence.

10. Changes, suspension and termination

We may update these Terms from time to time. A change is “material” when it affects the purposes or methods of processing your personal information, the scope of sharing, pricing matters, or other rights important to you. For material changes we will update the “last updated” date on this page and notify registered users on the site or by email. Continuing to use Paralight after a change takes effect means you accept the revised Terms; if you do not, you can stop using the site and close your account.

Service may be interrupted for maintenance, upgrades or events outside our control, and we may change, pause or retire individual features.

If you seriously or repeatedly break these Terms — bulk scraping, circumventing the paywall, posting unlawful content — we may warn you, limit features, or suspend or close your account. Fees are not refunded where an account is closed for your breach. If we end the service for reasons that are not your fault, we will deal with it reasonably under the Refund Policy.

11. Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them, are governed by the laws of the People's Republic of China (excluding the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions and Taiwan).

We will try to settle any dispute with you amicably first. Failing that, it will be submitted to the competent people's courts in Shanghai, China.

If you are a consumer, none of this affects mandatory consumer-protection rights you have where you live.

Severability. If any part of these Terms is found invalid or unenforceable, the remaining parts continue in full force.

Entire agreement. These Terms, our Privacy Policy and Refund Policy form the entire agreement between you and us regarding the use of Paralight, replacing any prior understandings.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms, or a content problem, infringement or abuse report: write to hello@paralight.fun or use the contact page for the right inbox. We usually reply within 2 business days.