Originally Posted by
tauphi
If you have a way of paying taobao merchants you can recharge your China Mobile account through that. They'll even give you a discount.
But buying things on Taobao almost always requires the use of 支付宝/Alipay, leading you directly back to the problem of only being able to pay using a direct transfer from a Chinese bank...
The lone exception to this that I am aware of is that one can add an HK-issued Visa/MC to their Alipay account
if they have a valid HKID. Of course, you also need to have a
verified Alipay account, which requires either a 身份证 or a complicated process involving a local guarantor...
