Originally Posted by gudugan

We have been through this drill before. Banking and Good banks in the PRC Discussion

Assuming nothing has changed since 2019:

• No, you cannot open a bank account with a US bank account/tourist visa. You used to be able to circa 2017ish with some in person HUCA. They cracked down on this and you now need a longer term visa or residence permit.
• Therefore you need a workaround. Opening a HSBC Premier account in the US and then using it to open a HSBC Premier account in China works. You need to go to the actual branch (which is linked to a specific location in a specific city) to activate the China account. HSBC has closed a bunch of their locations in the US but still operates if you are Premier. I have done this except for the actual in person account opening step (which I plan to do in the next few weeks, since I haven't been back to China since 2019). Have posted detailed info in the thread above. This does not require an address or residency permit, tourist visa is fine.
• If you have Citigold, this should also theoretically work. We don't have any data points. If you don't have gold, I doubt it would work but you could try.

If you are going to go through all this trouble, you might as well maintain a phone number. Discussion for this purpose is here: https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/chin...ies-china.html

Opening accounts for Americans anywhere in the world is a pain because of FATCA. If the value of the account exceeds US $10k at any point you also have to report it on your taxes.

If you decide (smartly enough) that this process is too much work, your options are Alipay Tour Card, cash, linking foreign credit card and hoping it works, or getting a friend to help you with everything.