Regard­ing Chi­nese L class visas, which are sup­pos­edly (post-May 2008, even) still not that dif­fi­cult to get, at the Syd­ney embassy.

Some things that your aver­age travel agent and TRAVCOUR visa pro­cess­ing prob­a­bly either don’t know, or won’t tell you. Unless you’re book­ing through a China spe­cial­ist, but hey, more info out there can’t hurt. The few travel agents I’ve spo­ken to this time around were happy to admit they didn’t under­stand what was hap­pen­ing, so noth­ing too bad to report on that front!

1. Only tick the bare min­i­mum. If you’re going for sight­see­ing, just tick that box. If you tick the rel­a­tives box you’ll have to prove they exist. You need to prove every­thing exists. The whole process is an exis­ten­tial nightmare!
2. A cer­tain secu­rity guard at cer­tain con­sulate (hint: I haven’t been out­side of Syd­ney since Feb­ru­ary and have been told in the last month to do this, which cer­tainly nar­rows it down a bit!) will not let you in with­out per­fect doc­u­men­ta­tion. He’s not Chi­nese (they use a pri­vate secu­rity firm at least for pub­lic areas), and not very under­stand­ing. If you’ve filled in a form before you get there, pre­tend you haven’t. If you need to go inside and try to talk to some­one this is prob­a­bly the best strat­egy. Call me naive, but this is prefer­able to fak­ing doc­u­ments using a travel agent, which was the course of action he rec­om­mended. I kid not. Let it be noted: The other secu­rity guard at the embassy is fan­tas­tic and nice and help­ful… but only speaks Eng­lish. Must be hell­ish for Hua Ren (with not-great-English) try­ing to get in!
3. Don’t actu­ally fake your papers if you can avoid it. I was (again, prob­a­bly naively) shocked at being essen­tially instructed to lie as a mat­ter of process, and obvi­ously this isn’t a course of action that actu­ally should be rec­om­mended by any­one. The process is dif­fi­cult enough with­out added com­pli­ca­tion brought about by fraud!
4. If your travel plans are uncer­tain, don’t worry about doc­u­ment­ing other cities too much.
5. If you need double-entry, for exam­ple because you’re trav­el­ing to Hong Kong and back into China, be aware that you will need to doc­u­ment a des­ti­na­tion back inside China. Again, the specifics of this don’t mat­ter too much — but you are meant to pro­duce tick­ets for travel along with your visa appli­ca­tion. Specif­i­cally speak­ing of Hong Kong, you can cir­cum­vent this require­ment by writ­ing in the itin­er­ary field “Des­ti­na­tion (by train)” or sim­i­lar method of trans­port that is very unlikely to be doc­u­mented months in advance. You will need proof of accom­mo­da­tion at your first des­ti­na­tion, but beyond this it doesn’t seem to much matter.
6. If you’re stay­ing with family/friends that may com­pli­cate mat­ters. You may or may not need booked accom­mo­da­tion for the dura­tion of your stay… I didn’t test this one out!
7. Hong Kong SAR isn’t a prob­lem at all re: accom­mo­da­tion or any­thing else if you’re an Aussie. So don’t bother with this for your visa appli­ca­tion… it’s part of China, sure, but not for the pur­poses of com­pli­cated bureaucracy!
8. The actual Chi­nese staff at the embassy are really nice and really help­ful, once you get past the troll­ish secu­rity guard and fig­ure out at least roughly what paper­work you need! If in doubt, fig­ure out a way to get inside and stand in the visa queue and ask them, and they’ll prob­a­bly be able to help you with what­ever ques­tion. That’s how I dis­cov­ered the (by train) itin­er­ary flexibility!

Finally, this is just my expe­ri­ence in one place in Aus­tralia, and will prob­a­bly change. Even in 悉尼 :P