transit in shanghai and visa issues

[anthony87]

hi,

I have plans to travel from N.America to Asia via Shanghai. On my outgoing trip, i will transit in shanghai for about 6 hrs, on the way back i will spend several days in shanghai. I currently have a single entry visa for this trip.. my concern is that, on my outgoing transit, i will "use up" my visa making it impossible for me to enter china on the way back. will this be a problem?

[gougou]

I have never done transit, so take the following with a grain of salt or two, but I believe if all you do is switch from one plane to another (i.e. not exiting the airport), you will not go through immigration procedures and thus won't have to use the visa on the first leg of your journey.

So make sure that both the incoming and outgoing flights are to the same airport in Shanghai (HongQiao or Pudong).

[Josh-J]

I was under the impression that you just get a Transit visa - presumably one for each transit?

[anthony87]

how do you go about getting a transit visa? i will be staying for about a week during the second transit, so i will need a visitor's visa... i just want to make sure that i use a transit visa on the way over instead of using my visitor's visa (which is already in my passport)

[Josh-J]

I'm not entirely sure (I've never done it before)... it seems you're in Canada; the relevant consular website has a page

http://www.chinaembassycanada.org/eng/lsfw/Chinese%20Visa/t37727.htm

saying what you need to do, but it tells you to fill out a visa application form and the form on their site doesn't seem to have anything to select between the type of visa you want.

If its anything like the Chinese embassy and consulate websites for the UK, there might be a different form available from a different website - the consulate I went to for my tourist visa had its own website with a completely different form.

In fact I just found this:

http://calgary.china-consulate.org/eng/lsfw/bgxz/default.htm

(not that I know exactly where you live but presumably the others have websites as well )

which has what seems to be a different form, but still doesn't say anything about transits. Maybe you could just fill in all the form apart from the bit about number of entries and ask when you turn up at tthe consulate..

I imagine you could go through an agent of course, but I don't really think thats going to be necessary if you're near a consulate/embassy yourself since I don't see why they wouldn't give you a transit visa. If you're really near a consulate you could always just pop in and ask.