I can confirm that both ctrip and elong accept foreign credit cards. Ctrip is more professional than elong, but for the one trip I booked on elong (PEK-SHA), elong had 40% discounts available when I wanted to fly and ctrip didn't. That seemed fairly good for a mid-day Friday flight.

I think that at T3 at PEK it takes forever to get to the gate area btw.

So how do I get a seat that isn't the worst on the plane? Any possible way, or do they just put foreigners into the lousy seats?