Surviving in China

Your passport is life. Protect it. Keep it in a safe place unless you need it. Never leave it with someone you don’t trust. If a hotel wants to hold it, give them a copy but check out before you leave it with them. A friend of mine had their passport stolen while it was in the safe keeping of a hotel. Street value of a US passport is around $5,000-$15,000, I’ve heard. It may be the most tempting and valuable thing you possess. Chinese people are typically very honest, but it just takes that 1 in 10,000 to change your life quickly.To get more news about Shanghai travel tips, you can visit shine news official website.

Know when you will need to bring your passport. You will need to have it with you for hotels, trains (rarely checked, but it does happen, and will be needed to buy a ticket or make changes), and planes. You will need to do anything with people at a bank, or even registering for, say, a customer loyalty card at a grocery store). Also may need it for checking into a hospital, but check to see if a photocopy will do. In any case, always have a photocopy or two of your passport with you. Carry one in your wallet or purse, and perhaps somewhere else also.

If your passport is actually missing and not just misplaced, don’t waste time waiting for it to be returned to a lost and found area. Chances are it was stolen or quickly will be. Start on the path of getting a replacement for your passport and Chinese visa. The replacement passport can be done fairly quickly, but the visa takes extra time. This will take about 3 business days typically, if things go well, so change your travel arrangements as needed. Immediately contact the US Consulate in your area (or the consulate or embassy for wherever you are from). They can get you started on this process. It’s also going to involve several hundred dollars and you will need to leave the country (Hong Kong is a good choice) and come back in to get your new temporary passport stamped and validated.

Of course, when I speak of your passport, I also refer to your visa/residency permit that will be attached inside your passport. You must not let this expire! Whether you are here as a tourist or an employee, pay close attention to the status of your visa and obey the law. Above all, don’t let it expire without having started some kind of official action to renew it. The rules became tougher in 2017, so what you think you know might not apply. Getting your visa renewed for employees requires renewal of the work permit first, and this now takes longer. Make sure you and your employer plan ahead. Read my near-disaster experience, “Five Days of Struggle to Renew a Visa: Some Discoveries in Dealing with Work Permit and Visa Issues.”
If you’re just visiting Shanghai for a few days, see my page “Visiting Shanghai” for tips on finding a place to stay. The information below is mainly aimed at those coming here for the long term.

Most people coming here for more than a few weeks will need to rent an apartment. Rent is expensive in Shanghai, where a 100 square meter apartment in a typical relatively new complex might cost from 6000 RMB ($1000) to 15,000 RMB ($2500) per month, depending on location and amenities. We’ve had good results using real estate agents that specialize in finding apartments. Some of these can be found online. Sometimes very good ones can be found by going to the area you are interested in and looking for prominent real estate offices along major roads and often near popular housing areas. They usually won’t speak much English, though, but some of the services that advertise online will have good English skills.

Landlords usually want at least a one-year contract and will require two months rent as deposit, in addition to your first month of rent paid up front. If you use a real estate agent, you may be responsible for the commission as well–find out how that works for the agency in question.

If you are coming here with children, being close to an international school may be a prime consideration. Unfortunately, there are only a couple areas in town with international schools and they tend to be well outside of the really fun and convenient downtown area, so expat families tend to congregate in those regions, namely, Hongqiao and adjacent Gubei, and Jinqiao on the PuDong Side. If you don’t have to worry about an international school, consider living in the heart of town as we do in HuangPu District in the very convenient and surprisingly affordable region known as LaoXiMen.

Many people live in PuDong but find that it is too spread out and leaves them feeling isolated. The subway system is improving there, but it has a much different feel than the crowded and bustling and extremely convenient neighborhoods of PuXi such as LaoXiMen, XinTianDi, XuJiaHui, JingAn, etc.