If you pay tax here then you can go to the bank and send your income out.

Or you ask a Chinese to send money out for you. A local can send up to 50k usd worth of forex each year

So is there any bank that lets you withdraw more than $500 worth of RMB in one transaction with a foreign debit card?

HSBC. You tell the bank the maximum withdrawal amount you want. You can also ask your home bank to raise your cash withdrawal amount beyond the roughly USD 100 amount. I've pulled over ¥30k out of the HSB ATM machine with my FOREIGN HSBC card - they reap the currency exchange difference - can't remember if I had to pay a fee...LONG time ago - circa 2005.

@yuantongsi
That's intereting. I thought there were tighter limits than that on Chinese sending money abroad. Do you know how a Chinese would best go about sending up to 50kUSD a year? Is it prohibitively expensive?

@Ocean

If you have a Chinese friend (that you trust) then put the money you want to send overseas into their account, then with their ID they can send the money overseas to your account.

Its not expensive in transfer fees, about 350rmb max depending on how much you want to send.

On the other hand Laowai can change about 100 usd (acording to the manager of the DongFeng road branch of BOC that I asked last week) worth of rmb into forex and send it out.

I thought foreigners could send 50K usd annually out, as long as it was to a personal account or educational institution, of course that info is a few years old.

I think CitiBank atms can do 5k rmb per withdrawal, but none in Kunming. I don't think there is a HSBC atm in Kunming yet. Interestingly, cash recycling machines (crs) have a chance of surpassing 3k, only because they physically can handle more than 30 bills, but expats have had varied luck, with abc, icbc, and merchants bank crs machines sometimes allowing 5k withdrawals.

@YuanTongSi
Thank you. My (trustworthy, Chinese!) wife will take a look into that. Cheers.

i use military banks from usa, i can withdraw 4800rmb per day. one of my banks refunds all atm fees at the end of the month. any atm that accepts visa or mastercards i can use. my second bank has an intl surcharge of 1 dollar every time i enter my pin. the withdraw is about the same as my main bank (4800). i can also do rmb deposits at crs atms at the rate of 6rmb per dollar. (ive done this at construction bank)

That's really interesting. You can stuff rmb in a Construction bank crs machine, enter a non Bank of America account number and end up with increased usd account balance at what is probably the cash rmb spot rate. Is that about right?

wait... you put your card into a machine then put an account number in on a deposit. i understand why you struggle for your 2k rent. i guess hashtags are needed. #downs#broke#neg#score#paying#off#student#loans#tard#cant#use#/r