Shanghai Exit-Entry Bureau

This week I had another fun trip out to the Shanghai Exit-Entry bureau! My wallet is now 457 RMB lighter, but I’ve got my passport back with a brand new visa in that now means that I can leave the country! South Korea, here I come!

The bureau is a bit tricky to find and navigate, and most foreigners in the South East of China will inevitably end up having to go to this office at one point or another, I thought I’d write a post about this weird and crazy place at the end of subway line 9, to help people.

Taking the subway was the easy part, since there is a stop on the relevant line near SJTU, and all I had to do was sit until the end station, Middle Yanggao Road. Then, there are two main exits, but I got off at exit 3 and then crossed the huge road towards the corner with a building site, and then set off down Minsheng Road. Or at least, it was a building site the first few times when I arrived there. If you’re reading this blog from maybe a few months or more in the future, you might find that there is now a big skyscraper there! I had been in the bureau only one hour to pick up my passport, and during that time they had already erected some metal barriers equipped with lights to cover up the building site

Large metal sheets installed during the hour it took me to get my passport back, in order to cover up the ugliness of the building site!

            It must look very pretty at night with all the lights on, but what I think this most illustrates is how much Chinese culture places such importance on keeping up nice appearances and covering up negatives. But I digress…..

Here is the view of exit 3 from the opposite corner showing the intersection that you need to cross, regardless of which exit you take.

You need to cross to the corner where the people on the right are going, and then just go straight ahead for two blocks

             From this point on though, I was equipped only with an address and Google maps on my phone.

Weirdly, there are two buildings on Minsheng Road very close to each other that come up as a result for a search of “Shanghai Exit-Entry Bureau”. The first one on your right “Shanghai Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau” was the one my phone initially pointed me to, and it was a very large and imposing building, guarded by two guards at the entrance near the base of the stairs and a further three or four, up at the front door of this official looking building. Since I had no clue where I was going, and thought that this place looked way too over the top for just visas, I asked one of the guards, hopefully they’d be just like policemen in the UK – ie. great to ask for directions. Luckily, they were very nice, and armed with the address written in both English and Chinese, they knew where I needed to get to and gestured that I needed to go a bit further.

So the place I think most people need to actually get to is a good two blocks away from the metro station, where Minsheng road meets Yingchun Road. This is called Bureau of Exit-Entry Administration Shanghai Municipal Public Security on Google maps. You can’t miss it because there is a massive big sign on the front in both English and Chinese:

Front entrance of the Exit-Entry Bureau

When you go in, there are lots of signs, and not many of them are very helpful! I stopped at an information kiosk on the ground floor (1^st floor in China) and asked a young lady where I should go and she directed me to the third floor (2^nd in English), which was a floor of one of the most mental administrative systems I’ve seen. When you arrive, you’re supposed to pick up a ticket from a machine, which shows your position in the queue. A display board shows when you’re next and which desk to go to. So I waited. But occasionally, one of the ticket attendants would shout something in Chinese down a megaphone and hold up a piece of paper with a group of about 20 numbers, when there would be a massive rush of those people going to a desk, any desk. There were maybe 12 desks on this floor, and two extra attendants with the megaphone guy, and they all had police uniforms on. The total number of staff in this building alone must be about 100, and I was thinking what a cushy job this must be if you’re in the police force – it’s a well, respected, easy job, all you have to do is sit behind a desk all day and push papers around! Don’t have to do any of the crime solving or fighting! Like I said before, I think this is the key to the success of the Chinese government - creating all these unnecessary jobs to keep everybody employed!

When my number was among those called out, I duly went in the scrum to get to a desk. When I got one I was asked if I had had my picture taken yet. I said no, but I had a passport photo with me. This was not good enough, so I was sent away again.

Now, I was already lucky to be slightly more prepared than the average person that comes to this crazy office, because this very helpful lady at the international students office at the university had already advised me about what to do and take, and she had even prepared the correct form that I needed to fill in and printed it off and stuck my passport photo to it, and gave me instructions on where to go an even how much it would cost by different methods. I know most people arrive not knowing which of the plethora of forms they need to fill in and have several unsuccessful attempts before they finally get the right one, or they have to leave again to get some passport photos done or get another document. So I felt like I was quite prepared. However, having the correctly filled in form, passport photo, letter of admission and proof address was still not enough, so then I went downstairs and spoke to the same lady who I asked in the first place, and then she directed me to the digital photo booth, which puts a photo they take of you on to their electronic database. A part of me was screaming inside “WHY COULDN’T YOU HAVE JUST TOLD ME THAT I NEEDED TO DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE”, which would have saved me at least 45 minutes of waiting upstairs.

Of course, at the photo booth, nobody spoke English, so I was gestured into a seat and then had a photo taken, not knowing whether I needed to pay, but since nobody asked me for any money, I then went back upstairs to get another ticket and wait.

But by this time, of course, it was coming up to Chinese lunch time (11:30 to you and me). So the number of manned desks was reduced to one, with still roughly the same amount of people waiting (but thankfully the guy with the megaphone was now gone too). So I had to wait another 45 minutes before finally a couple more ladies returned from their lunch break, and at last the queue was starting to move at a reasonable pace. I spoke with one of the ladies for maybe 5 minutes and then was told to come back two weeks later (on account of the upcoming Golden week).

So this week I made my return, and it was slightly more straightforward. Collection of your passport is at a section on the right of the front entrance on the ground floor. There was a huge queue of people for two kiosks where you could pay the fee for your new visa, so much so, that a little snack shop had set up just next to the queue, selling drinks and biscuits, etc. When I saw this I began to imagine that I’d be stood in the queue for an age, but actually it moved along at an acceptable pace. I then went to pick up my passport with my receipt, and they gave me back exactly that – and nothing else! So no more is my acceptance letter from SJTU – be warned, only submit copies of documents unless you don’t want to see them again! But perhaps, they just took the letter to stop me getting another visa, since I’m only allowed to change it once with an F-type.

But the bottom line is, I can now make two extra trips out of China and they will let me back in! So, next stop, Seoul…..