mousefai,

Here are some thoughts. BTW, I'm glad I read that you said you are native Chinese, please don't take offense. My general impression is that many Chinese are taught to follow the rules, not the intention of the rules, don't experiment, just follow rule.

Some rules that employees may be told are:

1) We do not accept foreign credit cards.
2) We only accept credit cards that have the Union Pay logo on them.

To satisfy these two rules this is what I do.

1) If asked "Is this a foreign card?" The answer is an emphatic "No." and do not waiver one bit from this position. It would be up to them to prove otherwise.

2) Take the card you printed out from Discover and cut out the large "Union Pay" logo from that card and use clear tape to affix it to the Discover card. Now you have satisfied rule #2. The rule says nothing about how the logo must be affixed and I have yet to run into an employee who can deny that the card satisfies rule #2.

Using these two techniques I almost never have an issue.

I have some rare, and odd things. For example, there is a local bakery that my wife went to and charged something like $4 and Discover detected this as fraud and denied the transaction. No idea why, for such a small amount with months of history making purchases in China and my account is noted to show that I am in China. Weird, but Discover's automatic fraud system will occasionally deny transactions. I would guess maybe 1 in 100 will get denied like this.

Let me know how it works out for you.