N̶o̶ Foreigners Allowed!
Some of the many rules and public service announcements you may see posted at lower cost hotels
I am a translator. The company I work for—the company I own—is a translation agency. We do translation.
I say this because I want to make clear that I am not a travel agency and my company is not in the tourism business.
I do, however—since midway through last summer—offer a service helping foreign nationals with travel in China.
Specifically, I help with two things:
1) Assisting people who aren't confident at their ability to speak Chinese on the phone at finding out the most up to date Covid related travel restrictions their destination has for people from their current location; and,
2) Ensuring that foreigners' hotel check-in will proceed smoothly without any of the "we don't meet the qualifications to take foreigners" nonsense or lies about new local regulations.
This year, the police were involved at some point in 1 out of every 3 places I stayed
The decision to start this service came on the heels of the most absurd rejection I have received in the more than 20 years I have lived in China.
Without going too far into the background details of why I had just spent two hours in the front seat of the only police cruiser belonging to a small town from the Taihang Mountains, we pulled up to the only hotel in Neiqiu County to publicly list themselves on the online booking sites as “we take foreigners”.
We were here because the town whose police car I was in didn’t so much as not have any hotels which could “take foreigners” as it had “no hotels with currently valid business licenses” and, once the police had gotten involved in my lodging situation, they couldn’t turn a blind eye to my staying some place that wasn’t supposed to be operating at all.
Something about indoor plumbing now being a requirement to have a business license
This hotel—which the Exit and Entry Administration explicitly sent us to as a place "experienced in taking foreigners"—was located the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. As a result, I'd initially negotiated a trip to the next town on my route (only for us to find that the boss of their one and only licensed hotel had already gone home to bed and wasn't interested in coming back for a lone customer).
Arriving here, we pulled my bike out of the trunk of their cruiser and left it parked - red and blue flashing lights still running - in front of the hotel entrance. Enough stuff had already gone pear-shaped that day that I insisted—ridiculous though they thought I was being—on the police coming in with me.
The not open hotel
It's a good thing I did as the first words out of the Front Desk's mouth when she saw me were: “I’m sorry, but we don’t have the license to take foreigners”.
"Don’t be silly," the one uniformed officer said "the license to take foreigners stopped existing in 2003”, followed by the other with “this is where the government told us to take her."
Front seat of a police car is infinitely better than the back
It would take another hour, and I would still need to go behind the front desk to check myself in on account of my being the only person present who knew how to select the “foreigner” menu item off of the drop down list on the Hotel Guest Registration System, but I eventually got myself checked in.
The same as Chinese people, foreigners need to be registered when we stay at a hotel in China. The same as Chinese people, we are registered on an online system provided by the Public Security Bureau. In all ways that matter, the only difference between a foreign hotel guest's registration and a Chinese one's is that our information must be entered manually instead of with the automagic wave of an ID card at a scanner.
Other than it being a convenient excuse that saves face better than admitting "I don't know how to do that", there is no discernible rhyme or reason behind a hotel saying “we don’t have the license to take foreigners”.
Checking myself in at the supposedly "trained" hotel
I know of a pre-Covid situation where a German girl (staying in a dorm room of a hostel whose front desk had sworn til they were blue in the face that “we can’t take you” to the point of her calling the police on them) woke up the next morning to the sound of her native language being spoken by the other foreigners already staying in the same room.
Although there are certain trends and regional indicators, whether or not you will be rejected bears no relationship to the hotel being listed on the booking platforms as “does” or “does not” take foreigners; whether or not a foreigner stayed there last year; whether or not you stayed there last week; the price of the hotel; if the hotel is a nationwide chain; or, what the prevailing Covid restrictions are.
The police station refused to believe that I already knew how to use the registration system. If they hadn't stopped to print off a cheatsheet, they might have arrived before I finished entering everything.
As best I can tell, "no foreigners" is entirely at the whim of the person currently on duty at the front desk; or, if they’ve called the police to ask “how do I register my foreign guest?”, the whim of a local officer who either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or can’t be bothered to figure things out because he thinks the paperwork will be too much of a hassle.
I used to tell people to book with Trip.com as the only way to be listed on their English-language, foreigner-facing platform was to explicitly tell them “we take foreigners” and, if they decided not to take you, you could make the problem the hotel illegally created for you into a problem for the platform’s English speaking Customer Service staff.
Unfortunately, after a year or so of an increasing number of foreigners forcing Trip into honoring their bookings by upgrading them to a different hotel at Trip’s expense, Trip’s Customer Service has doubled down on supporting the hotels at making shit up and now makes this an unpleasant experience that may go on up through multiple levels of escalation.
You'd think the prominent poster with the information about foreigner check in would help with getting the front desk staff to understand that foreigners can be checked in, wouldn't you?
Therefore, even though I’m not a travel services company, I’m offering a service to help foreigners with this garbage.
100y to call all the government hotlines for your destination and confirm what the current Covid restrictions are on people coming from your current location.
150y to call all the relevant government offices and hotlines to confirm both that you aren't trying to visit a Closed Area and that the place you are trying to visit still doesn't have any regulations regarding foreigners. This will be followed by a call to your already booked hotel to politely inform them just how much trouble they will find themselves in if they dare to think of doing anything other than honoring your reservation.
100y for each additional hotel on the same trip.
Because not all offices pick up their phones, people who want this service really need to contact us at least two business days in advance.
They wouldn't let me behind the desk so I had to lean way over in order to tell them what to do
Understand that once you find yourself standing at the Front Desk being rejected, you don’t really have many choices left beyond either accepting it or yelling at them until they see the error of their ways. As someone who frequently resorts to this astonishingly effective technique and has gotten a lot of great bar stories to tell her friends from it, this can also be a real mood killer and—at least until it's the third or fourth hotel in a row—you may just want to walk away.
For those of you who are very confident of your Chinese language skills and who would like to explore options other than paying my company to do this for them, I’m happy to provide tips, tricks, and guidance.
Checking myself in
My business is translation. Although anything that involves bridging the cultural gap of languages falls under the umbrella of translation, this particular travel service exists not because I want your money but because I’m righteously annoyed.
Attached, in chronological order, are all the Chinese laws on foreigners staying at hotels.
(Approved by the State Council on September 23, 1987
Issued by the Ministry of Public Security on November 10, 1987
Revised on March 29, 2022 according to the Decision of the State Council on Amending and Abolishing Certain Administrative Regulations
China Tourism Hotel Association
May 1, 2002
40y per night in 2022
Hotels have the right to refuse a guest under the following circumstances:
(1) The guest is carrying dangerous or explosive goods which threaten the safety of the hotel;
(2) The guest is engaging in illegal activities;
(3) The guest is negatively affecting the image of the hotel (i.e. has animals with them);
(4) The guest has no ability to pay or has a record of evading payment;
(5) The hotel is full;
(6) There are other law based rules or regulations preventing the hotel from accepting the guest.
I still maintain that my ending up in a Closed Area was the fault of the people who didn't put up signs of any sort
(1) Submit the passport or residence permit for inspection;
(2) Provide proof related to the reason for travel;
(3) Fill in a Travel Application Form.
I love when officialdom tries to tell me that the fairly clear "I can stay here" rules which they provided in poster form don't actually mean I can stay here"
An astonishing number of places with giant posters listing the relevant documents which a foreigner can use to check in still try to say that Foreigners can't check in
As menu items go, in most provinces, it's not even that difficult to find
Article 76 Under any of the following circumstances, a warning shall be given, with a fine of no more than 2,000 yuan also be concurrently imposed:
(1) Foreigners refuse to accept inspection of their exit/entry documents by members of public security;
(2) Foreigners who refuse to submit their residence permits for inspection;
(3) Persons concerned fail to go through the formalities for foreigners' birth registration or death declaration in accordance with relevant regulations;
(4) After a change in any one of the items registered in their residence permit, a foreigner fails to go through the formalities for altering the registration;
(5) Foreigners within Chinese territory fraudulently use others' exit and entry documents;
or (6) Persons concerned fail to go through registration formalities in accordance with the provisions in the second paragraph of Article 39 of this Law.
Hotels that fail to process accommodation registration for foreigners shall be punished in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Penalties for Administration of Public Security; hotels that fail to submit foreigners' accommodation registration information to public security organs shall be given a warning; where circumstances are serious, such hotels shall be fined not less than 1,000 yuan but not more than 5,000 yuan.
Things would be so much easier if they'd just issue foreigners scannable ID cards
美国译员岳玫瑰在中国生活了 20 年，其中 18 年在海南。身为海南凡一翻译有限公司的老板，她是海南国际传播中心的专用翻译、校对，也是中国外文出版社的英文翻译、审查，同时是海南最大外国人微信群群主。
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