Don't ask for reciprocity from a US perspective. They might be willing to introduce a US like unfriendly and slow border control based on a US model. Getting into the US (even without visa on a non-suspicious passport) is by far slower than getting into China.

Well... This is not my experience. China border control can be painful.

That's a small price to pay for freedom.

Here you don't have to register your residence with the police when
visiting.

We live in a democracy stateside.

The Chinese have never claimed they are a democratic society so why judge them by our standards? And they aren't nor will they be the last that requires registration of our residence with the police when visiting....

The subject of reciprocity for visas has been discussed ad infinitum and the same people repeat themselves with the same arguments....move it to the omni thread.

The question here is whether 2 yr tourist visas are being granted....

What's also stupid is that they ask where you are going to be staying and yet you still have to register even though they already have the information.

While I agree that the registration requirement is a bit on the draconian side, "they" refers to several different entities that don't communicate well with one another. Furthermore, it's fairly common for people to get PRC visas even though they don't have any definite trips scheduled, in which case they can write whatever city comes to mind in that field. Finally, "Hilton BJ, room 1102 on June 1" makes travelers much easier to locate than "Beijng".

They need to update their foreigner tracking system with electronic tagging,
rf or gps ankle monitors upon entry.:D

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

"Hilton BJ, room 1102 on June 1"...LOL my mind was on Paris for a moment when I first read that

Yes. Precisely this.

We live in the DC area and my DH went to the Chinese visa office to get our visas recently. The wait was over two hours to apply and about a half hour to pick up. YMMV. Some people spent over a half hour at the window because they were appplying for dozens of visas for school or church groups.
I believe anyone can pick up so if you have a friend in DC they can Fedex your passports to you.

Ouch. That's kind of what I'm afraid of. I know people who like/love me, but I'm not sure I want to subject them to a two hour wait.

Making folks go twice is cruel and unusual punishment. :)

BTW, I was amused by the comment which suggested the one-year visa rule was a profit-making scheme. Strangely, I've always thought the Chinese bureacracy was the one organization in China not primarily motivated by money. That may be a silly belief. :)

I'm guessing that I've done ~20 trips to PRC consulates either to drop off or pick up passports, and have only encountered a long wait (1.5 hours) once on the drop off end and the longest I've had to endure during a pick up was 15 minutes.

IME, if you catch them on a Tuesday or Wednesday (before their lunch break!), you should be able to get processed in around 20 minutes.

1 year tourist visa
 

Maybe someone else will have better luck. Just got my passport delivered back with a one year tourist visa....as I reported earlier, at least for NY Consulate, they're not giving out 2 year tourist visas.

NY just happens to be where I received my 3 recent rejections as well. I'm hoping people shoot for 2-year visas in other consulates so we can collect more data.

The visa agency I used prefers NY because apparently the people there are nice to his staff (he had previously used SF). In the past, I've received 2 year visas from DC, Los Angeles, and Houston.

There's some new provisions for foreigners coming to China to visit relatives.

2). Foreigners (aged 60 and above) who have no direct relatives in their home countries and enter China to live with their direct relatives in China. :confused:


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