I'm not saying the original poster the "Chinese expat" make up a story. But he gives misleading information. Claim it's fake maybe not accurate.
1.The national ID is revoked only under some special case that the citizen is believed to be leave the country and give up the citizenship.Not for short term stay like visit/travel. For those whose Chinese national ID being revoked, they are not the equivalent of expat in Western country although technically you can insist it's expat. Again as you said the policies in China varied from place to place and even from time to time. Many emigrant such as aged family reunion emigrant can even keep their national IDs
2.China becomes a business orientated society. There's no reason to exclude passport owners to buying a train ticket online if there's a way to do it. The difficulty here is the cost of passport reader which is monopolized by only few US and European manufactures that only border control agencies can afford, while resident ID readers can be purchased from multiple domestic providers competing for quality and price. It's pure technical and economical reason, not because a regime want to do sth against its own people.
Your thoughts about somebody being paid (maybe with wu mao) is interesting and also a quite common belief
It is not difficult to make a passport reader, and the Chinese are definitely capable of that.
You can read the contents of the RFID chip using $100 off-the-shelf hardware, and the decryption key is the OCR string on the “main” page of the passport.
The piece of glass where you lay the passport, the OCR, and the case itself I’m sure any Chinese contractor could easily do as well.
1.The national ID is revoked only under some special case that the citizen is believed to be leave the country and give up the citizenship.Not for short term stay like visit/travel. For those whose Chinese national ID being revoked, they are not the equivalent of expat in Western country although technically you can insist it's expat. Again as you said the policies in China varied from place to place and even from time to time. Many emigrant such as aged family reunion emigrant can even keep their national IDs
2.China becomes a business orientated society. There's no reason to exclude passport owners to buying a train ticket online if there's a way to do it. The difficulty here is the cost of passport reader which is monopolized by only few US and European manufactures that only border control agencies can afford, while resident ID readers can be purchased from multiple domestic providers competing for quality and price. It's pure technical and economical reason, not because a regime want to do sth against its own people.
Your thoughts about somebody being paid (maybe with wu mao) is interesting and also a quite common belief
reply