I certainly have no reason to doubt you.....I wonder if this is a request by the merchant's or a remnant of older times which you may or may not be old enough to remember. Way bank yonder before the fall of the Soviet Union, if you visited there, you were steered to special stores (called I believe Beriozka shops) which only took convertible Western currency, not rubles and each of the satelite states had similar stores. Of course China was just flexing its muscles then and was essentially closed to Western tourism but has since developed into pretty much a capitalistic eonomy so I wonder if they still do this to try to acquire Western currency....I doubt it frankly, it's just a thought.

But in any event, although I haven't been to China, if I was told they couldn't avoid the dcc scam, I would follow up on what I said i.e. circle the local currency amount write local currency option not offered and be on my way and then dispute the charges when they billed me and let visa/mc handle it.