Originally Posted by
narvik
Arrived at PEK a couple of hours ago.
RAT: yeah, I self administered a RAT before filling out the declaration, but also took an unused test with me, just in case. No one asked to see the RAT or its result, other than the QR code of course.
E-Channel: signed up for e-channel at PEK (after Immigration). Quite a bit of confusion by staff on how to do it, but it only took 10-15 minutes.
Let's see if it actually works though, on next exit.
That's good to know - thanks! I am leaving for my first trip outside China since Jan 2020 next week, and will need to re-register for e-channel when I return later in June (new passport issued last year).
Originally Posted by
narvik
Dang! That reminds me of what used to happen to me pre-Covid: on exit it used to fail more often than not.
That is probably a different problem - the issue on exiting China is that (at least at airports) the system is set-up to associate the exit through emigration with a boarding pass. The problem with that is that it requires the name on the boarding pass to match exactly the name entered into the e-channel registration system - so if you have a longish name it is likely that it is truncated on the boarding pass, or maybe the flight is only booked using first and last name, but for e-channel registration they used all names in your passport.
There is a work-around for this - namely to tell the person manning the e-channel gates (there to tell people who don't know to first scan the boarding pass) that you are registered but have a foreign name so need a manual override. At Beijing T3 I had a 100% success rate doing this - at Beijing T2 (only tried twice) they simply refused and told me to use the regular lines.