Originally Posted by
JPDM
I guess that all these places who are selling tickets and that have the ability to print them are official outlets. I have never found one where I could get my tickets (in Shanghai and Nanjing). The fact that some people have been able in a few places makes me believe that they "can" but generally they "won't" because they don't want to or are not supposed to.
To me, the idea of a place being able to sell, but not issue seems completely illogical. In the early days of online ticketing, I never had problems picking up tickets at kiosks, but then the policy strangely changed to train stations only (didn't need to be your train station). Perhaps this policy has been reversed again? Or maybe it's a Ctrip only policy? More data points (e.g. from the OP) would be useful because this happens to be a case in which empirical evidence is probably more telling than any official documentation we might be able to dig up.