Police Barged into My Room While I Was Covering Fujian Chemical Spill
Pro-tip: look for small, cash only hotels. Those &quot;uncly Liu inn&quot; style lodgings are easy to find in rural areas.<p>If they are cash only, and not issuing fapiaos, it means that they have no formal registration.<p>For travel, mopeds are not required to have number plates, and are not triggering number plate scanners.<p>Cash only intercity buses also likely running informally. Tickets for regular rail are also available for cash, but lately there are reports of police doing ID checks on trains.<p>Telling this as helpful tips to avoid excess attention from police as a foreigner in China. Living in a big city with sizeable foreigner population is relatively easy. The only &quot;minor&quot; inconvenience you encounter are occasional 4am police visits to check your ID, and a broken door if you happened to be out during them. While in smaller towns, you can easily be one of, say, 20 foreigners in town, and the police attention to you will be much more &quot;personalised.&quot; Also, get a Chinese name. It is said that foreigners with Chinese names get way less attention than people with non-Chinese names.