Fuddland

It’s been over about three years since I wanted to transfer money from here back to the UK, so I did a quick search for what information I needed to provide to the bank and was pleasantly amused to find my own post about it come back as one of the first hits. Armed with the relevant details, I went to my local Bank of China branch and told the nice lady at the Foreign Currency Transfer desk what I wanted to do.

Unfortunately I hit a bit of a snag because, as I was informed, a foreigner is only permitted to transfer up to US$500 worth of RMB per day. The amount I wanted to transfer was a bit more than that, and I didn’t really want to be going to the bank every day for the next couple of weeks, paying bank changes every time, so I asked if there was a way around it.

The first suggestion was to get an official tax statement from my company declaring that I’d paid the relevant taxes on my income. Whilst I have indeed been paying said taxes [honest gov’nor], I’ve tried getting the official form in the past and the best my company offered me was a spreadsheet printout stamped with the company seal of officialness. I showed it to the nice lady and she said it wasn’t the right thing. I was just about to leave and steel myself to try and extract the official official tax statement from my company, when the nice lady had another idea.

Chinese citizens are apparently allowed to transfer up to US$50,000 a year out of the country, and it turns out they can do this on behalf of a foreign friend. Naturally I can’t vouch for the true legality of this, but I was reassured by the nice lady that no trouble would befall the Chinese citizen in question provided they did not exceed the yearly limit. In that case, I said, could she be my friend for the afternoon and help me transfer the money on my behalf? [Having been asked countless times by complete strangers here if we can be friends, I had no qualms about returning the request on this occasion.] But she said that as a bank employee, she could not help me.

So I made a call to my very good friend and colleague [who happened to be just upstairs in my office], and within a few minutes the transfer process was underway. For some reason you have to state the amount you want to transfer in the destination currency, even though you only really know for certain how much money you have in RMB. There was a brief period of mild farce where every time they double-checked with me the amount I wanted to transfer, the exchange rate had changed and we had to recalculate that I had enough in my bank account to cover it. But it was all relatively simple to get done, and two days later the money had arrived in my Smile bank account.

By the way, my friend and I had to sign a total of four forms to complete the money transfer. When I arranged to get a throwaway pay-as-you-go SIM card for my Dad during his week-long visit, I had to sign six different pieces of paper. But at least the mobile phone company gave me a two free toiletry bags containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and a face towel for my troubles. The bank couldn’t even copy my name out of my passport correctly when I first opened the account, so it was particularly satisfying to finally close my—or rather, Davind’s—account with them.

#1

Elisabet (aka your nose fan) | 2009 / 06 / 02 – 10:23

You really made me laugh with this post…
Good to see you’re doing great in China and your chinese is so good - better than my english!!
Kisses

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