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You do not need a flight booked for a Chinese visa. You do need an address in China where you will be going to. You don't need a hotel reservation either. Just find a hotel you plan to stay at and use their address when filing for your visa. If you are a US citizen you should automatically get a 10 year visa. I'm not sure why the previous poster got a 6 month visa, and to be honest, I don't really believe that. I didn't even put an address, I just put the city and province I would be going to.
A really easy way to find out what you need is to go to travisa.com and fill out all the information they need. Just don't complete it if you don't actually want to finish the process. You can print out all the documents they have. I just did it a couple months ago, but I've forgotten some of the questions. China is a great place to visit, but it can be difficult without knowing the language or having someone who can translate for you.
To obtain my visa, I used a well-known China visa expediting service, which has locations in several North American cities. The staff seemed very knowledgeable, but it is possible that there was some kind of glitch in how the process worked for me. As I said before, they expected me to be granted a 10-year visa, but my passport came back from the consulate with a 6-month visa instead.
I just checked my passport again and it indeed only allows 2 entries during a 6-month period, with a 30-day limit on the duration of each stay.
To get that, the only travel information I supplied was a hotel address (I actually reserved a room there, but cancelled it before my trip). Also, I didn't supply any flight booking info, since I didn't arrive in China by aircraft.
I just made a single day trip into China proper and actually stayed in one of the SARs (Macau), for which I didn't need a visa.
To obtain my visa, I used a well-known China visa expediting service, which has locations in several North American cities. The staff seemed very knowledgeable, but it is possible that there was some kind of glitch in how the process worked for me. As I said before, they expected me to be granted a 10-year visa, but my passport came back from the consulate with a 6-month visa instead.
I just checked my passport again and it indeed only allows 2 entries during a 6-month period, with a 30-day limit on the duration of each stay.
To get that, the only travel information I supplied was a hotel address (I actually reserved a room there, but cancelled it before my trip). Also, I didn't supply any flight booking info, since I didn't arrive in China by aircraft.
I just made a single day trip into China proper and actually stayed in one of the SARs (Macau), for which I didn't need a visa.
That's very odd unless you didn't have a typical visa. I went back and looked at the official Chinese visa application and there is only 1 option, 10 year multiple entry. A 6 month visa shouldn't even be possible according to their application.
My first two visas to China were 1 year each, multiple entries, but that's before they started the 10 year visa. Chinese also get 10 year visas to the US. But, that doesn't mean you can stay 10 years, it's maximum of 6 months in each 1 year period with a possible extension of 180 days, but I've heard those are often denied.
I'm applying for residency in China later this year.
They seem to have changed that in the last few years. Now they are giving 10 year visas (even if you ask for 1 year). Prior to that I had to renew every year.
You have to indicated your travel plans on the application to the consulate - flight dates and where you will stay, you can "approximate" that and they don't have to be booked necessarily, there is no indication that they verify this.
The above info is applicable to business visas however (which require a whole other headache of additional forms - invite letters and company letters).
When I traveled to China in 2009, I dealt directly with the consulate in Houston and received a 1-year visa, with number of permitted entries listed as "M" (I'm not sure what that means -- perhaps either multiple or business).
On the website for the Embassy of China in the US, I found a page that says this: "From November 11, 2014, the Visa Office of the Chinese Embassy accept 10-year multiple entries visa application for tourist(L)/ business(M)/ short-term vsit to the relatives (Q2)/ private matters(S2) purposes and 5-year multiple entries visa application for study(1) purpose. The requirements are the same as before, the passport submitted should be valid for at least 1 year.
Please be advised the above arrangement."
The discussion here is useful to me, since it's likely I will want to travel to China more than once in the next 10 years, for tourism and/or for study. I may even want to live in one of the SARs for a while, but I expect the rules for that will be different than for the rest of China. (I imagine the rules will be the same eventually, but probably not in my personal time frame.)
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