As many of you know, China requires you to list your full itinerary with dates and addresses when applying for a tourist visa. I probably won't risk it, but I'm just curious, what if you said you were staying at such-and-such hotel but had never actually booked it?

Or to put it another way, how do they actually verify this? Do they have a list of all bookings in the country?

Which of course begs the question why they can't just look people up in their list rather than requiring people to list it out again on the form, but that's a separate question.