L visa for more than 30 days

[Dalioux]

Hi !

I will be going to China this summer for 5 weeks this summer.

I was told to apply for an L (tourist) visa.

However, the website says you can only stay for 30 days.

My airplane ticket very obviously says I am staying for a little longer than that.

You can ask for a special permission, but there are no guarantees.

Has anyone done this ? Is it possible to extend my stay once in China ?

Thank you !

[hunanfan]

I called the embassy in Houston last week with the same question. Because I'm married to a Chinese national, I was told to apply for an L-visa with a 180-day duration. Toward the end of that 180 days, I should be able to extend it through the local foreign affairs/PSB folk.

[fanglu]

You should be able to extend without any major problem towards the end of the 30 days. I suspect your major issue will be your airline not letting you board if you can't show a visa for the whole period covered by your ticket.

[chyilande]

I got my L visa for the duration of 45 days. It could be because my fake ticket booking showed I would be in China for around 40 days. So they might do the same in your case.

I actually only had a one way ticket (the return leg of the original return ticket), and the airline didn't make any problems for me. And it shouldn't because you can legally extend your L visa (after the first 30 days) twice, each time for another 30 days.

When extending you need to show you have 3000 us dollars (or the equivalent in any other currency) on your bank account in a Chinese bank. You can basically open an account and put the money there on the day when you go and extend, take your bank book and show it in the police bureau, and once you submit the papers, take the money out. It is just a formality. I have been doing it for a while now (with getting out of the country and coming back every 3 months).

So no problems there!

[koreth]

The embassy/consulate has the ability to issue visas longer than 30 days. I told the consulate in San Francisco that I wanted to stay for 5 weeks and they gave me a 60-day double-entry visa. I didn't show them a plane ticket or anything like that.

One thing to note is that the 30-day limit appears to be a hard-and-fast rule for multiple-entry visas. The person at the consulate told me to change my application to a double-entry if I wanted a time limit greater than 30 days.

Part of it may depend on whether your application happens to land in the hands of an agreeable consular official, though. The visa length is completely at their discretion.

[BrandeX]

The last visa I got in the states was a mutliple entry with 120 day stay good for a year, so I am not sure that this always holsd true.

[roddy]

Was there anything you provided to justify that - evidence of family ties, previous stays in China, itineraries, or was it just a case of ticking the boxes and getting what you asked for?

[BrandeX]

as for me, I just wrote on the form I wanted to "visit around guandong for about a year, incuding macau and hong kong"

[Dalioux]

Hi everyone !

Thanks for all your help !

In the end they just gave me the 60 day visa without any problems, so I guess I worried for nothing.