Originally Posted by jiejie (Post 30077252)

There is no requirement to follow your visa application itinerary. Once you have the visa, you can deviate at will on entry/exit points and methods as well as all points within China. There is no requirement to self-report any changes to any authority, either. When you check into hotels, the real-time registration process trumps whatever was put on a piece of paper.

It's only been in the last few years that some bureaucrat in the central government thought this flight ticket/hotel booking/itiinerary proviso was a good idea; before that for quite a long time, there was no requirement to provide any of this stuff with a visa application.