Travelling to China? Don’t: at least not just yet, or not independently

I love China, I rarely have bad things to say about the country or the people and never about the food, but there’s one thing that I never do and that’s gloss over the facts to pretend that life here is utopian. Independent travelling in China has never been easy, but for now, it’s close to completely impossible unless you’re fluent in Chinese or have a very astute person with you who can translate for you.

Some background, I’ve lived in China for 16 years, I speak some Chinese although definitely more functional than fluent, I can order food, get and give directions, book a room in a hotel and generally get by under normal circumstances. I once travelled by bike from the Southeast to the Northwest of China, 4,500km, with another foreign friend who spoke no Chinese at all. I taught him how to count as we cycled through Gansu. We managed to get by, stopping in remote places, checking into hotels and arranging food which was generally what we were expecting. I also travelled by bike from Harbin in the far Northeast to Zhongshan in the Southeast. Both of these journeys were long, through small towns in rural China and each had some difficulties with hotels that say they can’t take you — because they “aren’t authorised” to accept foreigners.

The truth is different, all hotels for the last 15 years or more have been allowed to accept foreigners. The only issue is that the hotel registration requires an additional step and that is registration with the local police. Some hotels have set up to do this online, some do it through their mobile phones but many simply say: “we don’t get enough foreigners, so it’s easier to tell them we aren’t authorised and send them away”. The problem with that is when they send you away, they won’t tell you where to go, unless you ask them and if you don’t have the skills to do that, this is going to be a very long and frustrating process for you. The reception staff aren’t the problem, a lack of foreign independent travellers means they rarely see us, and if they do, they often don’t know how to handle us. Poor management and poor training are the problems. At least they were until 2020.

Covid-19 has created an additional layer of bureaucracy which is almost un-navigable by anyone who is not a seasoned traveller. Even myself, I’m currently travelling on a bike again and have spent the last 6 nights in hotels. Not one of which has been easy to check into, in fact the worst evening was being turned away from 3 different hotels and then finally, after more than 3 hours of trying, finding one which took 45 minutes to check us in. So, what’s gone wrong.

Quite rightly, China has put into place a system of checks for all travellers to ensure they aren’t travelling with Covid-19, or if they do happen to have the disease, then an additional system is in place to track and trace people connected to the traveller.

Let’s be very clear here, I don’t have any problem with the system, I have a problem with how the system is operating for independent travellers and how the problems manifest themselves when staff in hotels have no clue about the process.

In my own case, I’m treated differently to my Chinese wife, despite the fact that we’ve been married 13 years and the two of us have been together in our home, not travelled outside of our province and not been in contact with anyone who has had Covid-19. In fact, the city where we live hasn’t had a confirmed case of Covid for more than one year.

So, many hotels are being told by local officials not to accept foreigners but to send those foreigners to one or two hotels that will accept them. Usually, these are expensive — in our case, that evening, we were turned away from a hotel that costs 158 RMB a night and sent to a hotel that costs 625 rmb, when we arrivred there, apparently, the only hotel athorised to accept foreigners told us: “we’re not authorised to accept foreigners”. My wife, who is Chinese, could easily have stayed in the cheaper hotel and quite comfortably too, but not me.

In every city there is a telephone number you can ring if there’s a problem, a complaint or you want to make a suggestion. 12345 wherever you are in China, this number will link you 24 hours a day to the city’s government.

Since we were told it was a police matter, my wife first called the police department, they said it’s not a police matter as the information had come from the government, then my wife called 12345 and they said it’s the tourism department, made a couple of calls for us and came back to say there are, in fact, only two hotels in this city we can stay in. So, I was talking to a member of the Foreign Affairs Bureau in Zhongshan at the time about another matter, he said he would make a call. Finally, we were told, after more than two and a half hours that we could stay in the cheaper of the two “approved” hotels. On our bikes it meant riding another 1.2k

On arrival in any hotel there are a couple of things needed if you are Chinese or foreign. Don’t get me wrong and think this part is racism or lack of care for foreigners. Every person entering a hotel goes through the same process, the Chinese can handle it quite easily, it’s us independent travelling foreigners who can’t.

First of all, you need a Green QR code — how to get this is by scanning a QR code, inputting your name, your passport number and your telephone number — you then ask for, and are sent, a 6 digit passcode which you enter and once done, you’ve got your QR Code, show it to the hotel staff, they will take a photo of it but then, if you close the app you’ve lost the code. Four out of Five times, they will ask to see it again because something has gone wrong and you will be required to re-enter the same process, taking several minutes each time — my record so far has been three times. Secondly, they need to see your Itinerary. Now you need to scan another QR code, one for China Mobile, One for China Unicom and one for China Telecom — do you know who issued your SIM card? The response screen you receive after scanning this code is only in Chinese (the first one for the green QR code has optional languages, but this one doesn’t), it asks, in Chinese, for your phone number, your passport number and your address for the next 14 days. This is awkward if you’re travelling on a bike! So, I input my home address and it seems to be accepted each time but of course, it means they don’t have proper traceability for me. Once this is done, you’d think you’ll be ok to go to your room, but not just yet.

They now want to see not just your passport, where the hotel receptionist will clumsily leaf through every page looking for your visa. My passport is wrecked, there’s a tear on the spine and most of the pages are very dirty. You can no longer see which country I come from by looking at the front of it because they’ve worn it away. it no longer works in any scanning machine anywhere in the world because of the way Chinese hotel staff roughly leaf through it. Once they find your visa, they’ll take a copy of it, usually by folding the rest of the booklet over the back, something I hate to see done to books as it breaks the spine of them. After that, they need a copy of the entry stamp from your last entry into China, in my case, it was more than a year ago, but during Covid, so I have one other document I need to show them and this is the certificate of a negative Covid test. I actually have two, one from last March when I re-entered China after a short trip away and one from a week ago which I decided to have done as I knew I would be travelling and might need this — to date, I’ve needed to show this only once but am worried that even if it’s not required (which it isn’t) it’s now over 7 days old and useless as any kind of verification that I am Covid free.

So, despite complying with all the laws relating to immigration, quarantine and Covid restrictions, foreigners, who are generally not treated differently to Chinese people suddenly find things difficult. Even when we are allowed to stay, the bureaucracy required is onerous, complicated, time consuming and often impossible to navigate, unless you have a great translator — which, luckily for me, I do.