Originally Posted by
moondog
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.
I got a Unicom SIM at the airport in early January with no questions asked, just a cash transaction. Worked until about March (had international calling and even international roaming enabled so I could still use the card after I got home). I even had a friend with a Chinese bank account and access to whatever the Chinese equivalent of Paypal is, recharge the card to see how long I could keep it working. In early April, I got a text saying that I had to go to a Unicom store and give them my real name, or the card would stop working, and service was cut off a few days later. So they have implemented the real name requirement, but cards will work for up to 3 months without it.