Ever since the China Government decided to take biometric information from its visitors, you can no longer apply for a visa through a travel agent. Instead you have to go to this third party company called China Visa Application Center to apply for the China visa. We had been there twice and learned a few things. Hopefully our experience will help you avoid the unnecessary trouble.

Finalize Your Itinerary

Even before you start applying for the China visa, you need to finalize your itinerary. Yes, it’s counter intuitive and you are taking a bit of a risk. The only thing you can do to minimize your risk is to use credit cards that have trip cancellation (make sure you call the credit card company ahead of time if visa denial is a valid reason for a refund) and use hotel booking website like Booking.com that provides generous cancellation policies. Although it’s more work, I would suggest that you plan your itinerary as close to the actual itinerary as possible. If you are going to spend a month in China travelling around different cities, don’t create an itinerary that only has a one month hotel booking. Also, make sure there is no gap in your hotel booking. I have read that you will get rejected if you have any gap in your booking.

Online Application Form

Once you have your itinerary set, you can go ahead and go to the China Visa Application Center website and fill in the application form. Having lived in North America for a while, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information the application form collects. Everything from where you were born, where you worked and where you studied to who your parents are are included in the application form. Just filling in the forms for myself and my family took me almost the entire day. Besides these factual information, you will also need one physical photo and a digital photo. I use Walmart’s photo service which provides both. One hint on photo taking, make sure your forehead is not covered by your hair. The online application form will reject the photo if it deems that your face is covered, even if it's only your forehead by your own hair.

Once you have one application filled, make sure you choose to download the application data for upload later. The reason for this is two folds:

  1. Your next application can start by importing the previous application’s data. Chances are that some of the information can be reused, and more importantly,
  2. You may need to make adjustment to the application and you can easily start a new application by uploading the previous one. Oh, did I forget to tell you that once you are done the application, you cannot make changes? You have to start over from the beginning. These archived records literally save me tens of hours of rekeying everything.

Complete and submit all of your family members' applications. Once you are done, you can then schedule an appointment with the China Visa Application Centre. They only process three applications per appointment. So, if you have a large number of applications, book multiple appointments.

What to Bring to Visa Centre?

Everything. This is not clearly explained on the web as there are no hard and fast rule on what are required for each Visa application. I figured that the following documents are absolutely important:

  1. A copy of the itinerary including flight confirmation email, hotel booking confirmation for EVERY application.
  2. A copy of your passport for your application.
  3. A copy of your passport and your spouse’s passport for each of your child’s application.

Since we were not born in Canada and were originally from Hong Kong, we have to provide the following extra documents for EACH one of our children’s applications as well:

  1. Original and copy of birth certificate of your child.
  2. Original and copy of your and your spouse’s Canadian citizenship card.
  3. Original and copy of you and your spouse’s Hong Kong ID card if you or your spouse was born in Hong Kong.

Finally, if your name was ever changed or is different in any one of the supplied documents, you’d need the original and copy of the Name Change Certificate. Different provinces in Canada have different forms and requirements, e.g. Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta.

What to expect in the Centre?

When you’re in the centre, be prepared to provide more clarifications onsite. For example, I have to explain how I plan to travel from city to city in China because there are no flight tickets in between cities. The answer is quite obvious, by train of course. But you'd have to state that in the application. Even after our applications were accepted by the centre and paid for, we were called to send in a couple of letters explaining some minor discrepancy among the supplied documents. Luckily, they accept email and save us a trip to go there again. After the lengthy preparation, the actual wait time is surprisingly fast. We got our visas in a few business days.

Final Words

All in all, I believe the staffs in the China Visa Application Center have good intentions and are genuinely trying to help you get your visas. However, the lack of clear guidelines makes the whole experience less than optimal and the requirements can feel arbitrary at times. Given how much people are paying for the application, I hope the centre can improve the overall experience.