Published by Swiss James on 23 Nov 2007 at 04:00 pm
Opening a bank account
Due to a combination of my shirty landlord and having my pocket picked at the weekend, it was finally time to get a Chinese bank account this week.
Basically it’s easy- all you need is
1 x Passport
1 x Guy what speaks Chinese
1 x The patience of a saint.
The patience is for when you first take a ticket and realise that there’s only 1 person in front of you. And yet that person leaves and the number doesn’t change for the next half an hour.
The Chinese speaker is to fill the form in, explain why your passport doesn’t have a password , or why your name is not in Chinese characters.
The passport is the only ID you need.
If you’re of the bald persuasion- the Chinese person will also be userful to explain that the guy in the passport photo really (no honestly- I think he must have been ill or something, yeah just 29- and he gets fatter every day too) is the same guy who’s standing in front of him.
Ten minutes later, they’ll give you a bright and shiny new ATM card right there and then
Followed immediately by your 6 digit (they don’t mess around here) PIN number in a little sealed envelope:
Leaving you with just one problem, what to press on the auto-feedback-machinator
It’s a shame there wasn’t one for bewildered, but quite impressed.
Just did this last week at Bank of China in Suzhou. A friendly woman greeted us at the door, asked us in English want we wanted, found the form for us and filled in all bar the signature. We then were handed over to a bank teller who also spoke English, spent 5 minutes typing things into a computer, turned the screen around so we could check the spelling (a rarity in China) and then handed us a card. Whole thing took less than 15 minutes and was completely painless!
I saw a statistic somewhere saying something like “In Shanghai what takes 60 minutes during the week and 66 minutes at the weekend?”, the answer was going to the bank.
Get ready to lose half a day every time you need to go to the bank!
As a professional market researcher I find their feedback options slightly imbalanced. If they have satisfied and dissatisfied and acceptable, they should also have unacceptable as an option.
Your experience (and Byron’s) seem remarkably pleasant and not at all typical of my experiences, but it could be a sign that things are getting better in the banking industry. Here is a more typical example of banking in China by Adam and I also had several banking blues stories on my old blog site.
I think the fact that we were in the most expat central branch of Bank of China in Suzhou Industrial Park may have had something to do with it. And having read Adam’s example … just the idea of trying to bank a fiver is insane! Why not convert it to RMB and stick that in your back pocket … it’s only 75 RMB for Pete’s sake!
The one I went to was in a pretty obscure place- “financial center” near the Airport Ramada hotel. Mostly airline / airport staff in there, so no reason for the bank tellers to have any English skills.
It was fine basically, other than the wait at the start- in the UK it takes about a week from going into the branch to receiving your card and PIN.
BTW Byron, has anyone (or have you) chosen a chinese name for yourself? And if so did they go for the obvious
“白人”?
So obvious even I can read it … but of course I never did think of that at the time. My Chinese name is the slightly pretentious ‘Bo Rong’ … errr, find seldom used pinyin interface … 拨荣 … which some kids at school chose. I ask them to pick one which a chinese person ,ight concievably have, and I have to sau they were successful as I’ve run into a few (well, two or three) people who have said ‘Wow … that was my Uncle’s name’ or summat like that.
Good stuff, mind you- I can’t think of a time when I’ve had to use my Chinese name- not even when there was a space for it on the bank form.
Heard a good story the other day about someone who got to name a class full of Chinese kindergarten kids and called one of the boys “Sue”. Hopefully someone in the psychiatry ward will explain the many layers involved with that choice during his adult years.
So James, what is your Chinese name? and don’t give us none of them squiggles. Oh alright give us the squiggles as well so we know what not to get tattooed with when drunk in Doncaster.
Champignon- it’s Ker Jie Ming, or in squiggle language 柯杰明
If you ask any tattoo artist around the Sheffield-Hallam area, they’ll know how it goes. Any inker actually in Doncaster town itself will assume that’s what you want as soon as you sit down- unless you specifically tell them otherwise.
You haven’t told your Chinese chums what minging means in contemporary UK argot have you Ker Jie?
Yes, that’s why they chose it.
Actually- fun Chinese fact of the day the symbol for moon (or month) is 月 and the one for sun （or day) is 日. Put them together and they mean “Bright” 明 = Ming.
So, no-one got my Paris Hilton joke did they?
James, I got the joke but it just didn’t motivate me sufficiently to reply.
Standards are falling.. When are you going to post more pictures of unconscious locals who’ve lost control of their bodily functions, that’s what we’re all here for!
as soon as you managed to put the Rohypnol in Weijia’s drink rather than your own - you bumbling, sleepy clown.
thanks for the advise, your humour encouraged me to attempt the hurdle, only problem now was getting my money from the bank in uk, US travelers cheques are like Tesco carrier bags, full of rubbish, no one wants to change them,
Tom- take that Tesco! I like it. No idea how you get the money from your bank in the UK other than using your Blighty ATM card to get the cash, then using the crazy deposit function on the ATMs to put it in.
Have you tried that yet? It’s terrifying- you put all of your cash in its mouth, it chews it for a while, spits out the dog eared ones, then tells you how much it reckons you’ve put in. Whether it keeps a couple back for itself, I couldn’t say.
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