Originally Posted by
gudugan
I did, but it took 2.5 hours at a China Mobile center in town which doesn’t meet the requirements. Also I need to keep paying for the plan.
You can get on arrival SIM at Shanghai airport but that also doesn’t meet the requirements.
Google Fi is a last resort backup option but it’s expensive and slow. Also I’m banned from it from too much international roaming.
Try Unicom next time. You can call them at 10010 (option 2 is English) and ask them where to go to get a SIM (a lot of their stores don't sell SIMs at all, let alone to foreigners). Their English CS is really great IME (e.g. you'll never wait more than 2 minutes to get connected and the person who you talk with will be smart as a whip). And after you're enrolled, you can call the same number to drop your plan down to 8 per month. Mobile is better country-wide, but Unicom is quite solid in major cities.
SIMs on arrival at PEK or PVG are no longer an option. I just wanted to give the Unicom lady at PVG Y300 to top me up, but her offer was Y50 for WiFi access in the airport only. So, I called 10010, and they hooked me up with a free 48 hours. This allowed me to access data and pay them, plus get a taxi home.