Beginning to wonder why this thread isn't in Omni/PR!

Visa reciprocity...what about permanent resident reciprocity?


Obama's brother with a degree from Brown University, a masters in physics
from Stanford and and MBA from Emory..speaks fluent putonghua and writes in Chinese calligraphy.

And has a hit video on youku.


http://buzz.youku.com/2009/01/18/bar...er-in-concert/

Go to Google News, and search for "China Yuan Manipulator" and see the most recent relationship between US and China as reported by the press around the world, since last Thursday, two days after inauguration.

I do hope that when Obama flys into Beijing the Chinese will dispense
with "Hei Gui" and " Fei Zhou Ren" and use the proper address of "Commander-In-Chief" Mei Guo Ren.

well all else fails "Xin Nian Kuai Le!"^

Thanks for the replies. I forgot I started this thread. I still have time to get the visa. I thought he, well Congress, might lower visa fees to stimulate tourism, or because visas really didn't cost that much to process.

Considering that most if not all US consulates and the embassy in China are always very busy with long lines and quotas for Chinese citizens to get in, the State Department may need to hire more people or build more consulates. Those may not be cheap.

And seriously, when has the US Federal Government (including the Congressional branch) ever really cared about tourism to the US?

They just built a huge new Embassy in Beijing. Bush amd his papa were there to open it right before the Olympics.

They allowed limited Chinese workers to build it, security reasons?

The U.S. should worry about the fact they need China to finance the stimulus (and huge budgetary deficit).

The Chinese buying the U.S. Treasuries was one of the main fuel for the last bubble. Where else would the Chinese park their money? And if the Chinese let the U.S. went into a deep depression, who's going to buy all their products?

Well, with a pretty big deficit, and more on the way, seems rather unlikely that the US government is going to lower fees on ANYTHING.....they need every cent they can get.

As you must know, the DHS has an astronomical budget, much of which gets passed on to things like visa processing. Furthermore, I would venture to guess that the actual cost of processing US visas is pretty close to the break-even point (the interviewers are all on nice salaries and the new embassy wasn't cheap; I bumped into a lot of the construction workers at various bars and they were all from San Antonio).

All true points.. Response to the bolded text below.

So was our unquenchable thirst for debt and things we wanted but couldn't afford with our savings/incomes. Everything has to equal out, right?

Totally agree. Americans were hungry to spend, spend and spend; while Chinese were willing to lend, even at pretty low yield. Bubble made in heaven.

That's a coincidence, that's Bush's home state.:D

No coincidence. The Construction Manager of Record was Zachry Construction of San Antonio. Selection of this company for this plum (lucrative) project, was completely political in nature due to its Texas/Bush/Republican connections, this is a well known fact. Most of the site and project managers were from the San Antonio area, but many of the other US construction personnel were from other locations.

The new embassy consists of multiple buildings. Chinese personnel were only used for certain tasks in some of the support buildings. When the Chancery (most sensitive part) was constructed, the entire site was cleared of all people except for US construction staff with Security Clearances.