Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
Had a different experience with Chinese trains.
Shanghai to Wuxi--no tickets at all. ID cards for her relatives, passports for us. For us that meant absolutely no indication of our seats, although it's possible there was something on her sister's phone. Note that the normal exit check on your tickets didn't happen in Wuxi, they simply glanced at our passports. Her sisters scanned their ID on the way out, this appeared to be the normal exit check.
The return Wuxi to Shanghai had tickets as usual. Shanghai used our passports to do the normal exit check. I'm guessing some stations have fully deployed ID-only travel and some haven't. The system worries me a bit--our tickets were purchased with photos of the info page of our passports, not by actually scanning them. That basically says there was a human in the loop transcribing the information--and I'm used to my name being mangled here.
Wuxi was strange, we went through the security check to get into the station and then a second security check to enter the section our train left from.
This is the new normal, at least in the Shanghai region. Electronic tickets and just show a QR code on your phone and passport. It doesn’t really seem like the attendants checking do much to actually verify that the passport matches the QR code at the security check but they do check the QR code (not passport) on board to ensure you’re in the right seats.
The extra security for Wuxi was because you were heading to Shanghai and at the moment there is the China International Import Exhibition on now which is apparently a high security event because it is the brainchild of Xi DaDa.