On Monday, November 13th, we register our place of residence at the local Police Station. If you are not staying in a hotel and you are visiting a family or friend, you must report your arrival and present your proof of residence to a local police station within 24 hours of arrival. Since Carol’s cousin knows everyone, including someone working at the police station, and we were advised by her that we don’t really need to do it, because our stay is too short. We thought it best to do this any ways, just in case.
The locals no longer use cash for day to day activities. It is all on their cell phones. People no longer need to carry their wallets. All of their identifications, and monetary funds can be accessed using their phone and the WeChat app. You pay for everything using WeChat Pay. You can get food using WeChat, and you can arrange transportation using WeChat.
The past weekend, we felt totally handicapped. We had to depend on Carol’s cousin on everything! Of course we want to be independent during our remaining stay here in China, so I will describe here what we had to go through in order for us to enjoy the same level of liberty and convenience that locals do.
The very first thing is to make sure you have a cell phone that has a local Chinese number and has data within China. The way we did this is to simply purchased two Nihao Mobile SIM cards. China does not support eSIM’s. I purchased Airalo China just so that we have data access when we were traveling from Hong Kong to China, but the Airalo solution is not sufficient because it does not provision you with a local phone number. Activation with the Nihao SIM was pretty straight forward. I did have an issue with my wife’s SIM card, but it was quickly resolved with Nihao’s WeChat support.
Once you have a local Chinese phone number, you will need to open a domestic bank account so that it can be tied to your local phone number. You will need a local resident perhaps a family member or friend to help you out in this matter. I opened an account with the DRC Bank. However, my wife had an issue because her passport name was simply too long for their systems. She had to goto ICBC to open an account. The difference is that DRC Bank was able to activate my account in less than an hour, but ICBC requires a seven day hold on the account creation application. The difference in service is astounding.
Once I had WeChat pay tied to my bank card, I can pay for things with my iPhone! This is simply a joy. We used the Meituan (美团) app to order food delivery, and we used the DiDi app for local ride services similar to Uber. If you want an extended stay in China and want to travel on your own, then you MUST have the above setup. Without a local number and WeChat pay, it will simply be hell for you in China.
Below are the videos from the past two days showing the above process and how we enjoyed this convenience.