If this is your first backpacking adventure, I highly recommend not starting in mainland China. It is an order of magnitude more difficult a place to travel than other places.
The article makes it pretty clear that he's plenty experienced.
I agree with the thought though. Rural China is one of the most difficult places to get around I've been to. Outside the cities, most people are just not used to encountering others that can't speak or read, so you have to supply the skills to fumble around and communicate. And Mandarin is a fiendishly difficult language for the native English speaker, so it's tough to pick a few phrases to get around.
I found it very easy and I speak zero Chinese. Plus, it's very cheap, which makes a lot of things (e.g. finding a reasonable hotel for the night) pretty easy. Also safe.
This is frankly impossible. Either you were only in foreign tourist areas, or are a really experienced traveller. I speak a decent amount of Chinese, have lived and travelled extensively in China, and I still find China way more taxing than a country like Cambodia. I don't speak a lick of Khmer, but it is still a traveller's paradise compared to China.
I'm really at a loss to know what you found so difficult.
I did two things that I didn't usually do.
I got people at the hostels I stayed in to write down instructions for me (e.g. tell them to write down "I would like a haircut/I would like to buy a 2nd class sleeper at 22:30 from Xi'an to Chengdu" and stuff like that).
Another thing I did was have the number of somebody who spoke English and Chinese and call them up when I really needed some translation (e.g. with a bus station attendant telling me that their tickets are all sold out for that day).
That's it. Those are the only two things I did in China that I didn't do in Cambodia (or Shanghai/Beijing). Most stuff you buy you can buy just with gestures and a couple of words. Taxis can take you where you want to go with a point to a place on the map. What else is there?
I was in China recently. Met 2 girls who were traveling for the first time. They were planning to spend 6 months in Asia. They made some newbie mistakes in China, but otherwise had no serious problems. China was harder when I went 15 years ago.
They wanted to hop on trains at the last minute, but tickets sell out quickly. They ended up spending a lot more for air travel. They didn't get a guide book; therefore, they wasted a lot of time on logistics and wandering aimlessly around a city. They tried to get into hostels but these are sometimes booked up. They had no backup plan and went looking for a cheap motel. They are vegetarians and didn't know how to ask for "no meat". They ended up eating whatever they could scrounge from grocery stores. I'm a vegetarian and had some terrific meals. They will survive though.
If this is your first backpacking adventure, I highly recommend not starting in mainland China. It is an order of magnitude more difficult a place to travel than other places.