[carmen_sandiego]

Nobody asked me for a visa in 2015, and I was on a tourist one at the time so it can't even be some unified database thing they were using. A nice thing about Chinese banks is they can just hand you the card over the counter as well. That would never happen where I'm from in Europe-you have to wait for it to get mailed out to you.

Then again, I often find in China that workers/officials/whatever make up the rules on the spot, depending on what they know how to do, or what they consider too mafan. So maybe some will just 'feel' like you need a visa and others won't.

I get a similar thing in hotels where they can't be bothered to register my passport with the PSB, because they don't get many foreign visitors and so e.g. the computer to do it is not turned on. So they just don't do it.

I would guess you could get a hole in the wall to take cash most of the time, I just never see it done. One problem with cash in China is that the largest note has a pretty low value given how inflation is going and how costs are in tier one cities. Chinese people seem to think this is some kind of image management thing, where if they issue a larger denomination everyone will start freaking out about inflation. But I guess it's moot given how cash is losing favor anyway.

[seanmcdirmid]

I can imagine it differs between cities. Like Beijing should be the toughest for almost anything, however, while Shanghai is much easier...you don't have to go to the PSB to get your residency permit renewed after every foreign trip, for example.

My landlord used to make me pay my rent in cash, and we have to pay three months at a time. So I would withdraw 18,000 RMB from an ATM to take to my landlord. Thankfully, there are a couple of ATMs in Beijing that let you withdraw up to 10,000 RMB at a time, because when I had to use a normal one, everyone behind me in line was pretty angry. Then I would put it into my man purse, which was really fashionable in the 00s, because cash was king and you needed a lot of 100 RMB bills to buy things.

[carmen_sandiego]

I think China changes so fast that these fun personal touchstones come and go so quickly. I remember when I was first there you couldn't walk very far without hearing 'fapiao! fapiao!' from people selling them, so there must have been a fair bit of gaming cash-based payments, either for tax or company expenses purposes. Nowadays in Shenzhen I don't see that.

I used to adhere pretty strictly to the rules. Like I'd go register at the PSB as I moved around, all that stuff. At the time I figured, well, it's China, maybe they have some centralized place they're recording all this and they'll approve my next visa faster. But I've met other foreigners who just do not care about any of that, never register, and they get much better visa offers than I do. It's just a huge chaotic machine really.

You can talk to one official who'll tell you it's literally impossible to do X, where X is some thing that massively impacts your life there. Go to a different office or speak to a different person and oh yeah, you want to do X, no problem, and it's done in five minutes.

That drives some people crazy but I recommend anyone to experience China at least once in their lifetime. It's a very perspective-changing place.

[seanmcdirmid]

It got to the point that I registered with the PSB twice a year: first before I would renew my Z visa, and once after I renewed it (so twice in one month basically). Because my registration permit would become invalid when I went on international trips, but it didn't really matter until I went to renew my visa, and then my permit would become invalid again with the new visa, so that's what I had to do.

Different PSBs in Beijing had different policies though, Haidian was looser than Chaoyang (or at least the ones I had in each, both Haidian and Chaoyang are huge and probably have multiple ones).

Before I lived in China for 9 years, I spent two years in Switzerland. You do not want to mess with the contrôle des habitants, Swiss police/officials are not very understanding. I delayed my exit from Switzerland for one week (to attend a conference) and it became a huge deal even if Americans are firmly on visa waver. Mostly the opposite of China.