Thatīs really interesting.
In May nobody wanted to sell a Sim to me on my german passport.
The same in other Guangxi cities.
Everywhere the same answer - just with a chinese ID.
But nobody could give me or my gf an answer why.
My gf was also very surprised about that, as she never heard about any problems before (she lives in Nanning her whole life).
She hosted a couchsurfer couple 2 months before and told me that this couple didnīt have any problems to buy a Sim.
But thatīs China.
I'm in Nanning again today, and it doesn't seem like the status quo wrt street SIMs has changed in the slightest. Half of the convenience store type places in our part of town still have Mobile SIMs on offer, and half of them also have Unicom SIMs. These guys don't care about ID of any type; give them cash, and you'll get a number that you can start using immediately.
Is your gf only trying to get SIMs via actual Mobile/Unicom stores? If so, this could explain the ID requirement. As for not accepting passports, I'm quite certain that the Guangxi 分公司 of both Mobile and Unicom DO accept passports as a form of ID. However, I'm guessing that since very few Mobile/Unicom employees (even in the fancier parts of Nanning) have EVER had a register a foreigner, they don't know how to, and the easy answer is to say that "it's impossible".
On a slightly related note, we asked one of our Nanning employees to get a Shanghai number recently for prestige reasons (this may sound silly, but our clients don't have an especially favorable opinion of Guangxi). In spite of the fact that their was a newspaper stand directly in front of his hotel selling SIMs, he insisted on spending 2 hours to procure one at a Unicom store. I didn't fight him on this point, but I also declined his invitation for me to join him on the mission.
