Originally Posted by
zhuzheng
A few days ago in January, CA announced on its Chinese website that it would temporarily suspend accepting Visa, Mastercard and Amex cards online.
Anyway, CA's website has always been useless. Just go look for a good local travel agency, such as Ctrip.
I've been using their website for about 4 years, and it has always worked fine. If it was down earlier this month, it must've not been long, because I recently bought several tickets traveling between Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Beijing for an upcoming trip in Feb.
As for making payments on their website, you won't get the payment window loaded properly if you do not have a Chinese-language software installed (it's sufficient to enable the Chinese add-on in Windows.) You won't need to understand Chinese to proceed once your payment window is properly loaded. You can use either VISA or AMEX (I have never used an MC) to check out.
CTRIP is better if you want to search across different Chinese airlines, and they even have a 1-800 number in case you have questions. But they will charge you an online booking fee.