Interesting discussion. I've never heard of these special discount and nor has my wife (chinese). I've always booked tickets through elong and ctrip and got whatever discount was showing. Both the chinese and english sites show the same discounts. On a slightly unrelated note I've recently discovered www.travelzen.com - they have all the same discounts as elong and ctrip but the site is much more equipped to taking international credit cards. Elong and Ctrip both charge 3% and require a fax or scan of passport and credit cards. Travelzen takes payment in RMB for local cards or HKD for international cards (using a normal web payment system that actually works because its outside the mainland).

Charging one price for foreigners and one price for locals is technically illegal in China. Perhaps this is some kind of student or senior citizen fare. China is very bad at applying these kind of discounts across the board. To get student or senior prices you need to have local student or senior ID cards. It was great when we took my father-in-law to London - he got discounted entry into the London Eye, Tower of London etc just by showing his passport. In China you can't even do this in a different city. All the parks in Beijing have discounts for seniors but only Beijing seniors, a Kunming senior would pay full price. So you can't even get government subsidized discounts if you have ID from a different city, let alone a different country. Kind of pathetic really. They should just allow every Chinese student or every Chinese senior citizen to enjoy the same discounts (and even extend that to foreign students and foreign senior citizens). There are surely enough Chinese travelling around the country to ensure that the subsidies even out over time.

A residence permit replaces a visa. you no longer need a visa for the duration of your residence permit. You can enter/exit at will.

@GBTEXDOC - I used strongvpn a couple of years ago. They are good but at the time you had to make a choice about protocol and server location and stick to it. If you wanted to have access to a server in US and a server in Europe you paid twice. If you wanted PPTP, IPsec, L2TP and OpenVPN you paid 4 times. Each product was totally separate. I am not sure if this is still the case but its worth checking.

I like to have different server locations. Servers on the West coast of the US are the fastest for all connections because they are closer to China. However I need a server in the UK so I can watch the BBC iPlayer because its restricted by the BBC (not by the great firewall of China).

Even if you don't care about different server locations I think its still important to be able to switch easily between multiple protocols. Mobile networks in China do not support PPTP. Many devices (such as the iphone) do not natively support OpenVPN. Some wireless routers have been set up to block PPTP, IPSec and L2TP forcing you to use OpenVPN. There are too many variables so its best to have it all available.

With 12vpn you just pay once and get access to all protocols and all servers. They also have automated setup for most operating systems and even the iphone - they have a page which you visit from the iphone which installs all the profiles for you immediately. I just checked their website and its currently 35 USD a year for this.

Just checked strongvpn and the best deal is 55 USD per year for 4 cities (US and UK) on PPTP only. PPTP is blocked by some wifi routers (Prague Cafe for example) and doesn't work on mobile networks. They also do a 4 city package for 85 USD where you have to choose between OpenVPN or PPTP.

They do a lite package for 7 USD per month which gives you PPTP only access to one US server.

So overall I think 12vpn offers the best deal. No matter what device I'm using and whatever network or router I'm hooked up to they'll be a way of connecting. By the way I don't work for 12vpn!

Witopia is a VPN provider while OpenVPN is a VPN protocol. Saying one is as good as the other is like saying a car is as good as a road.

Infact Witopia uses the OpenVPN protocol anyway (as well as PPTP for backup)

My favourite VPN of the moment is 12vpn. They're not expensive and they give you access to multiple servers (US & UK) and a range of protocols (PPTP, IPSec, L2TP, OpenVPN). You can switch between servers and protocols at any time and for no charge. For example I might one minute be using an IPSec VPN to Los Angeles on my iphone over the mobile network and then decide I want to watch the BBC Iplayer so I'll load their London VPN using PPTP or OpenVPN on the PC.

"Native operating system support" means something can run via the OS without installing a client. On windows this is true of PPTP, L2TP, IPSec and SSTP (Vista and Win7 only). OpenVPN requires a client application and virtual network adapter. Can be a bit CPU intensive depending on your machine.

I've had the same problem. Tried to edit a post a few days ago. The page just doesn't load - just a plain white page. Tried with google chrome, Firefox and IE so definately not a browser issue.