@Sowad: As the Gokunming post linked above describes, everyone returning to Kunming with international travel history from the past 14 days will be sent to hotel quarantine for 14 days before being allowed to return to their homes.

Everyone I have spoken to who has flown into Kunming recently has described waiting for many hours to be assessed, processed and finally sent to their destination hotel.

As for people coming from other provinces with no recent travel history, processing should be quicker, but home quarantine is still a distinct possibility. Apparently foreigners are being subjected to extra scrutiny.

Just dropping in to say that I received a five year residence permit yesterday.

I've been on one year residence permits as owner/manager of my own small firm for many years now.

The entire application was done in-province. The only difference from a normal one year permit was that I had to do a new health check, and I had to get a local criminal record check covering my time in China.

That's another route worth considering. Simpler and quicker than the permanent residence permit, and most who qualify for that should be able to qualify for this one.

I take that back. Changshui Airport is saying to come four hours ahead. When people were first saying that a week ago, it was actually being refuted by multiple official accounts. Looks like it's policy now.

@AlPage48: That was never actually a real requirement. It was just something that spread on social media. People who followed that ended up waiting two hours for the check-in counters to open.

I would recommend showing up a little earlier than usual, but not that much.

China Law Blog is looking into the issue. They make some pretty good points here, but the general gist is "wait and see": www.chinalawblog.com/[...]