Beijingculture & etiquette

The obligation is national — Article 39 of the Exit and Entry Administration Law requires anyone staying outside a hotel to register with the local public security organ within 24 hours of arrival. What differs in Beijing is that it is actually checked. The registration slip is requested at the residence permit application, at renewal, at some bank branches, and sometimes during a neighbourhood check. Go to your local pàichūsuǒ with your passport, your visa, your lease and your landlord, and get the slip. Re-register every time you move, and after any trip abroad if your local station asks for it — practice varies by district and asking is free.

The Z visa is a single-entry entry document. Within 30 days of arrival you must apply to the Beijing Public Security Bureau's Exit–Entry Administration for a foreigner's residence permit, having first collected the physical work permit card. Employers here are usually well drilled on this because so many of them are large multinationals or research institutions, but the legal deadline attaches to you rather than to your HR department.

Chinese public schooling is organised around the hùkǒu household registration, which allocates a place by registered address, and foreign-passport children fall outside it entirely — a small number of designated public schools accept foreign students, but the mainstream route is closed. In practice that means an international school, at fees that assume a corporate education allowance rather than a salary, plus a place on a waiting list secured months ahead. If you have school-age children, settle the school before you settle the district: the good ones cluster in Shunyi and eastern Chaoyang and they will decide where you live.

Beijing rations plates by lottery rather than by auction. The winning rate for an ordinary petrol-car plate reached a record low of about 0.3% in 2025, and the new-energy vehicle queue — first come, first served rather than a draw — has run to more than eight years. Worse, a car registered outside Beijing needs a separate entry permit to come into the city at all, and those are limited in number and duration. Combine this with a weekday driving ban that excludes one plate-ending digit per day, and the answer is the metro, a bike and DiDi.

Beijing's annual average PM2.5 fell from about 89.5 micrograms per cubic metre in 2013 to 27 in 2025, and the city recorded good air on 95.3% of days that year with a single heavy-pollution day. That is one of the fastest urban air quality improvements ever recorded and the 2013 'airpocalypse' picture is genuinely out of date. It is also still several times the World Health Organization's guideline of 5, winter inversions still produce bad stretches, and spring sandstorms from the north are a separate phenomenon that no emissions policy fixes. Buy a decent air purifier for the bedroom and check the AQI daily in winter — you will use both less than you feared and more than never.

The city is organised as concentric ring roads around the Forbidden City, and Beijingers describe locations by ring rather than by district. Inside the second ring is the old city and the hutongs; the third and fourth carry the CBD, the embassy quarter and Haidian's universities; Shunyi and the international schools sit beyond the fifth. A cross-city journey can take an hour and a half in traffic and forty minutes on the metro. Choosing a home more than one ring away from your office is a decision about your evenings, not just your commute.