I'm having trouble printing the China Visa application. Everytime I click to print, the pdf file crashes and nothing prints.

http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ywz...ws/t785547.htm

Prints OK on IE.
Doesn't seem to be fillable, but I don't have east asian fonts installed.

Stop fooling with the official site. Go to www.mychinavisa.com and they will have a fillable and printable form. Note that for the DC Embassy and Houston Consulate, officials want the form filled out by computer, not hand. Other missions in the USA apparently still take hand-filled. Seems to work in IE and Firefox, not sure about other browsers/systems.

Rumor has it that some consulates have started using unique forms of late.

FWIW, I downloaded, filled in, and printed the DC form (being discussed here) less than 14 hours ago. I normally save fillable PDFs to my desktop and then open with Acrobat, but today I pulled off the entire drill from within Chrome.

I can confirm this will work. I used this service and their web site to fill in and get the visa last month. I had it back in 8 days and got a 1 year multiple entry which is what I asked for.

Not rumored, it's true. I was rudely told at the SF consulate that the form I printed from the web was the NY version and would not work at the SF office.

Save a blank copy, I'd like to compare and know what the differences are.

It's the same questions, just formatted different. Hence silly that they differ.

I think you are using the wrong URL for the forms

http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ywz...rap/t84254.htm

NYC absolutely requires that the form be printed. I watched a brawl nearly break out last week based on a person having only the hand-written form and the guard not letting her in the building.

Good to have another data point. However, more than any other Consulate in the USA, NYC changes its requirements abruptly and without notice. For years, it has had a pattern of doing this. Even the local NY visa agents often get caught flat-footed. At the time I wrote my post which you quote, best information at hand was that NY Consulate was accepting hand-filled in printouts of the new form. I suspect that fairly recently, NY decided to change gears without notice, and the poor soul who likely filled out the form by hand per Wednesday's rule, showed up Thursday only to find the rules had changed. I'd be p!ssed off, too.

I can predict that at some point, the other Consulates will also want this form filled in by computer then printed, so check first with the Consulate of your choice (or an agent serving that Consulate). It would be nice if the Senior Consular official at the Chinese Embassy in DC would put his/her foot down and say One Form, One Standard Fill-in Policy for the entire USA regardless of location. But that would make too much sense.

Its logical for them to require the forms be filled out on line.
That way they can read the standard font more easily with OCR
and this saves time and money, plus allows more efficient data mining.
And sell it.

The requirement of a typed/printed application for NYC has existed since 19 July 2011. http://newyork.china-consulate.org/eng/lsqz/t832701.htm

They stopped accepting cash in March 2010 but that didn't stop a woman there the day I was from trying to pay with two crisp $100 bills.