Is that the only requierment for getting a residency permit? "Live in China full time with your Chinese spouse for five years?"

Not from your embassy.

You need certification from a police agency in your country. Your embassy has nothing to do with it.

No.

In addition, you need proof of stable employment / income within China as well as proof of stable residence. You also need certification of no criminal record by the appropriate police agency in your home country and any other country that you may be a resident of.

Then there is a local background investigation.

P.S. Thank you for your reply

1. You can freely work without the need for work permits or permission of any sort*;

2. You never need to obtain another visa; your stay in China is virtually unlimited;

3. You can buy property under the same conditions as a Chinese national;

4. You can buy / sell US$ under the same conditions as a Chinese national;

5. You are treated as a Chinese national in most everything except for voting, holding public office and joining the Army.

Disadvantages:

Most Chinese people do not understand the true legal status of a permanent resident and you usually have to fight them when they come out with lame crap such as "You're a foreigner and you need special documentation to buy US$." Granted you'll always win, but it gets boring having to beat up on these people all the time until they learn.

* Unless you want to join the Army or hold high-level or sensitive government posts.

You really need to weld that dunce cap to your head because it's not coming off anytime in the near future.

When your permanent residency ID card needs to be renewed after ten years, you do not have to show you are, were or will be working -- ever.

According to the Chinese legislation as published in the State Council Gazette, permanent residency is -- duh! -- permanent. Just because an ID card needs to be renewed periodically does not necessarily mean the benefit expires. The first ID card a Chinese citizen gets is valid for ten years. Now, Einstein, we're waiting for you to tell us that after ten years that person is all of a sudden not Chinese anymore.

The fact is that for adults the permanent residence ID card -- as distinguished from the permanent residency status itself -- expires in ten years and you need to get a new ID card. The conditions under which you remain eligible are simple: have lived 90 days cumulatively or longer each year in China, or one year per each five. Exceptions may be made. In many cases, this an even more liberal policy that U.S. green card holders are under.

Finally, it would be more than myopic to believe that just because there are immigration lawyers in the U.S. that there are also immigration lawyers in China. The way that the permanent residence approval process is set up in China leaves absolutely no room for anybody but the applicant(s), the local Public Security Bureau, the provincial PSB and the Ministry of Public Security. Applicants are not represented by an attorney nor can they be. The process is so tight that even the local and provincial PSB has very limited roles to play in the process and absolutely no decision making authority.

As for a criminal records check, it goes back to the moment you were born. Anything and everything that the police have on file which is releaseable (i.e. no court order or legislative act which prohibits disclosure) is reported. This is standard, by the way, in all criminal records checks conducted in the U.S. Whether or not the ultimate recipient of the document wants to consider certain arrests / convictions beyond a certain point in time is up to them (and, if applicable, the law).