There could be some practical benefits from the new policy. Over the almost 20 years that I have lived here, I have at various times experienced differences between tourist and legal resident status over policies governing such things as who can purchase property, get loans from banks, exchange larger amounts of foreign currency (for down payments on houses and the like), engage in different types of business activities, and so on. Inspection of the type of visa or RP is often not enforced, but things could change for those holding tourist visas as time goes on.

Someone I know called the hotline and they told this person that foreign passport holders married to Chinese citizens without Beijing residency will be able to apply for the RP in BJ and not at the place of their official residency after the spouse has worked here for 6 months. This will also help some.

I am pretty sure that new RP regs are not aimed at non-Chinese foreigners living here but towards Chinese who lived aboard but still hold Chinese citizenship. The government wants to make it easier for these kinds of Chinese to return home. Many Chinese who left early on (and now are at the prime of their careers with lots of badly needed skills) had their hukou and ID card canceled when they left. Coming back to China with only their Chinese passports can be real troublesome, especially for their foreign citizen family members. If they take up a job in Beijing for example, but have no hukou and ID, how can their family members get a L visiting relatives visa to come with them? Better if they had given up their Chinese citizenship. Than it does not matter. In that case, with the RP that came with your work, your family can get RPs too. As it stands after June 1, those silly enough to have kept their Chinese citizenship will have equal rights with those who traded it for a foreign one, in this one aspect at least.

Any side benefits that non-Chinese receive from this regulation change and future changes in the immigration regulations are just that. It will be a long time if ever before China places a welcome mat out for foreigners married to their citizens. They do not want to encourage it for a variety of cultural and policy reasons (want to discourage visa fraud etc,). If you marry a Chinese and wish to remain here, you should do so with your eyes fully open. When you marry someone, you also marry their family (and country), for both good and bad. Let the buyer beware!

Just to provide some perspective. When I married my wife some eighteen years ago, they gave you a three month visa, that could be renewed 3 times and then you had to leave the country once a year to get a new one. I could not legally live with my spouse since I was a foreigner. When we went to a park, she paid the local's rate and me the foreign. I was supposed to be always using FECs and not the RMB which I had to buy on the street. Before we married, every Chinese male that knew me came to have a friendly chat to talk me out it. After the marriage, they never spoke to me again. I learned a lot of new Chinese words from the open cursing we took every day on the street. My wife was fired from her work unit (Peking University where she was a teacher) and they refused to give her permission to apply for a passport (in the end some years later I just needed to pay a "fee"), all for marrying me. They did not hide the reason for her dismissal. There were practically no jobs for foreigners to speak of,(so I ended up playing the main role in the second ever English teaching program produced by CETV in China. In the very first one, Dan Homer was the star. I had only the L visa but luckily my boss was the spouse of a high ranking official at the PSB). When we stayed at a hotel, I needed to show our marriage book if we wanted stay in the same room, including on our honeymoon. Once in a different city, even with the book, they would not let us have one room. That same evening at the same place, the phone kept ringing with solicitations from prostitutes. In other words, I could not be in the same bed with my legal wife (out of fear she might being a prostitute, or so they said), but the hotel was fine with me sharing it with a call girl they provided. China!

So no matter how hard people may think it is living with their Chinese spouse in BJ now, it is a lot better than before. China has made lots of progress. Recognizing that non-working foreign spouses of Chinese are actual residents instead of tourists, is just one more step forward and I welcome it. And in spite of the BS I have had to put up with, marrying my Chinese wife was the best thing that ever happened to me!