Howdy Howdy Howdy
American here, planning on visiting China for the first time at the end of the year.
Specifically wondering if anyone here has any advice on the visa process for American citizens -- I've been researching myself but I keep finding either conflicting or outdated information since things seem to change rapidly.
From what I gathered, one needs to make an appointment window to the closest Chinese Consulate and apply for a travel visa in person-- which is then good for repeat visits up to 10 years? Or are there single use visas as well?
Also I'll be happy for any advice about visiting in general-- it's a huge country and a lot of ideas to sift through. Was suggested for phone (android) VPN, sim card, WeChat, WayGo, Baidu, 12306, Didi, MetroMan, and Trip.com (missing any?)
Mighty obliged folks, yeehaw
Can I ask you a question? How wildly expensive is this?
I'm getting older, I've always wanted to travel abroad, but I've kinda just discarded the idea because I figured there's no way I'd ever be able to afford it.
Edit: thanks for the replies - I was right, definitely can't afford that
Oh well
The flights will likely be the most expensive part. Seems like you can travel in China pretty cheaply.
2k round flight, 500 for a visa agency to process your visa if your assigned regional consulate isn't nearby (it must be done in person)
Expenses while you're here: 20-50 usd for high speed rail tickets between big cities, streetfood/hole in the wall stuff is 1-2 usd, sit down restaurants usually 10-20 usd. Coffee is a bit expensive (4-5 usd usually, but if you just drink tea it's only about a dollar.)
If you don't mind staying in relatively crappy hotels/hostels you can get by with paying 5-10 usd a night, but you have to make sure they actually have a license to host foreigners.
@Flyberius@hexbear.net has been posting some travel photos and may still be there.
I'm from the UK but the process is the same I think. You have to visit the nearest consulate and fill out a form. Then return a few days later to collect your visa.
As for visiting, get and international SIM or eSIM before you go (travel Sims are rare in China for some reason). Take a VPN app. Install and set up Alipay and wechat and add some cards for paying for stuff. Install your banking apps so you can approve payments as I found mine were blocked constantly by my bank. Take some cash as sometimes your apps/bank simply won't cooperate and you'll need to pay somehow.
Have fun and eat everything
So I did this process in 2015. It might be different now, just FYI. I did have to go to the consulate, it's huge and miserable and you wait in line for over an hour. You apply for a tourist visa with a long forum, attaching proof of airline ticket purchase both into and out of China as well as a hotel room, and have to give in your passpt as well. If all goes well, they'll shoot you an email in a few weeks and you have to go back to the consulate to pick up your passport with your new shiny 10 year 90 day multi-entey visa. They do have single use visas but usually even if you apply for that single use visa they just give you a 10 year multi entry visa to encourage more tourism. As long as your fill the forms out right, you'll be fine. It's just quite time consuming.
When you get to China it's pretty much a normal place with a different suite of apps, the only big difference being everything is reliant on Alipay and WeChat. Menus are QR codes only accessible through WeChat. All stores only take mobile payments. You are required to use these apps to function in urban Chinese society. So definitely download them. Getting money into Alipay as a foreigner without a Chinese bank account is not easy, so make sure to read up on how to do it! It also changes all the time so I don't know the current scheme of how to do it. Wonderful place though, incredible food, everybody is very helpful even if they don't speak English, get a jianbing for breakfast and go for dim sum the next.
Install and activate AliPay here and get a SIMCard there and activate WeChat once you're on the continent with your new number.
Use a visa processing service, I recommend SWIFT Passport and Visa Services. Every region in the US is assigned a different place to get their Visas processed, here's the map of where you need to go based on what region you're in if you're USian
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It's all in person, a nightmare, and you'll hate it. Easiest to just go with a visa processor like SWIFT unless you're in the same city as your consulate.
Thanks for the info, any idea how much Swift charges? Appreciate it
Literally like, expect anywhere from 300-500 dollars. I was shocked, but apparently the alternatives are far worse lol
If you aren't fairly fluent in speaking Chinese then don't bother with attempting to learn phrases.
I say this without trying to throw shade on anyone but Chinese is a tonal language and, although English is a crypto-tonal language, we lack a conceptual framework for understanding tonal languages and it requires a fair bit of time devoted to learning tones before you can expect to be able to have decent pronunciation, and thus to say the correct words. (Long story but in Chinese the same syllable can mean 5 different words depending on the tone, then adding extra syllables, with their own respective tones, can make different words yet again.)
Unless you have already learned a tonal language to a reasonable degree of fluency then picking up spoken Chinese has a pretty significant learning curve for a native English speaker.
Learn how to say hello, goodbye, and thanks - that always goes a long way. But if you're hoping to engage in basic conversation, you're almost certainly going to need to physically point at the Chinese words themselves or to use Google translate.
Hm. I still think this relies upon a degree of familiarity with Chinese though.
If you don't know Pinyin then your phrase could be pronounced by an English speaker like "Wee-sheng-gee-anne zay nail-lee" and tbh that's going to to be pretty baffling.
But my point wasn't that you're not going to be able to communicate anything in Chinese but not to expect that grabbing a phrasebook would be sufficient to engage in basic conversation just from reading the Pinyin. If it were Spanish or Italian (or German, although you would have to go hunting if you want to find a German who doesn't know conversational English) you'd be able to use a phrasebook and scrape by with just that and nothing else because there's a lot of mutual intelligibility that exists.
But Pinyin is a different case because native English speakers instinctively do really weird things when they read words, particularly when it comes to vowels and emphasis, because our orthography is a fucking unmitigated disaster and it just doesn't play well with other languages, especially with the Romanisation of other languages which don't use the Latin script. I think that this is most obvious when you see an English speaker tries to write something purely phonetically without using the IPA. It's so damn hard to imply emphasis and even to clearly indicate the basic pronunciation of sounds, like with that "gee" I wrote above where you have to wonder if I intended it to be pronounced like "Gee whiz!" or like "Ghee".
This probably says more about the cultural insularity of where I live but one time I legitimately caught someone who read the name "Mao" and pronounced it as "Mayo" once. Crackers gonna have terminal mayo-brain and all of that, sure, but it says a lot about how native English speakers process language; if the same letters can be said as Máo or as Méiyǒu then you know you're in for a bad time.
If you're a complete beginner when it comes to Chinese then aside from learning the basics pleasantries I would probably just stick to memorising a few key words like toilet and food or restaurant because you're going to get by better if you just use them rather than trying to say a whole sentence poorly with a thick American accent.
Of course everyone starts somewhere and I'd encourage everyone to learn as much of foreign languages as they can, except for French, but I just wouldn't count on a traveller's phrasebook for communicating in Chinese the way that you would be able to if you decided to take a trip down to Mexico.
There are services that will visit the consul on your behalf if that is unreasonably difficult for you, though you do have to mail your passport in that case. Additionally I think the non-expedited path is fairly cheap but quite time consuming (several months).
i would not go to an american airport to get coughed on by sick americans
Definitely go through an agency unless you live in the same city as the consulate.
Now I’m a bit spoiled since I have a crewmember visa that’s essentially taken care of by my employer, but I imagine the process through an agency is basically the same except you have to pay for it. I think there’s a small chance you’ll have to personally go in for some extra secondary screening but that’s a random selection process and it’s pretty rare.
