Second trip to China - Less regimented planning?
 

With a first trip to China under one's belt, can itineraries for subsequent trips be freer and looser? The original visa application required a detailed accounting of where you stay each night on your first trip. With that step out of the way, there's no such advance monitoring of your time on a second trip. Can you put together a more flexible itinerary? Or, looking at question moondog posed in another thread:

… can you go to a destination that might raise eyebrows on a visa application?

Fill out your second and subsequent visa applications with the same care you successfully used for the first.

Xinjiang is a red flag on any visa application, now more than ever.

If you already have a valid visa, you can visit anywhere you in China you desire, apart from Tibet.

If you are applying for a new visa, round trip to Beijing is a safe way to play it. After you get the visa, you can change your plans.

Thanks. I'm talking about a situation of already having a valid tourist visa and making subsequent trips. There wouldn't be the advance approval or scrutiny necessary of your itinerary, correct? You'd be free to say, I really like this place and am going to stay a couple of days longer than planned.

Correct.

Sounds good. 谢谢。

不用谢

1) We have taken several side trips over the years in our visits. Only once was planned at the time of the visa application and thus listed. Nobody has said anything about it.

2) In the last decade the majority of our visits have been on already-issued visas. We've never had more than very vague plans for a trip other than the upcoming one.

Thank you, Loren. That's good to know.

Even for your first trip you did not have to follow what you submitted in your visa application at all.

Really? I did just to be on the safe side. ;)

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.

Ah, interesting. Thank you, jiejie. So your Silk Road trip raised no eyebrows, even though it might have had it been your first trip to China and you mentioned Xinjiang on a visa application?

In my case, I already had a Chinese visa in my passport and planned the Silk Road trip and made arrangements while already in China, so there was no need to report anything.

However, if it had been my first trip to China and I needed to apply for a visa and wanted to go to Xinjiang, I would have avoided mentioning it in the application itinerary and made up an "alternative reality" trip with bookings that matched, all in eastern China in typical tourist cities. Then cancelled the bookings after receiving a visa. While you don't need a permit and/or prearranged tour to go to most parts of Xinjiang, it is and has been a sensitive place to put on a visa application for quite a number of years now.

I've said it before and I'll say it again here--when dealing with Chinese bureaucracy (of which visa applications definitely qualify), there is the Truthful Answer and there is the Right Answer. If those are in conflict, usually it's best to give the Chinese what they want--the Right Answer--so they can happily process the paperwork and send you on your way, everyone a winner. And once in China, the visa application officer doesn't care about you anymore--you're now someone else's potential headache.

I actually didn't really put details on my application which I did a week ago and was approved. I just put the name of the hotel and the date and that was it.