Last summer I made it all the way from Shanghai to Chongqing without a single instance of the police straight up telling me "you can't stay here". Furthermore, the police only came by my hotel room once in a two month period and they came all pre-prepared with a guide on how to register a foreigner using the hotel registration software only to discover that:
a) I already knew how to use the hotel registration software and 
b) I had already registered myself.

So far this trip I've had the police in Yi County insist that I must go to the Foreigner Approved Hotel, I've had the police in Bai'an Township tell me I can't stay in any hotels in their township, I've had the Xingtai County police call my boss to complain about how rudely their foreign employee acted, I've had the police in Xixinzhuang Town bumble through a handwritten registration form because the online registration I'd already filled out somehow wasn't good enough, I've had the police in Wudinghe show up at the hotel to register me because the software had a nervous breakdown at the sight of a passport, and now I've had the police in Yanchi Town try (and fail) to get me to go to a Foreigner Approved Hotel.

Six interactions.
Five incidences.
Four provinces.

On the plus side, I've gotten back to not being nervous around police officers. And to having far too much fun at their expense. It's practically a game at this point. 

There's a stretch of about 10 or 15 hotels of varying sizes, quality, and price in a two or three block stretch in the southwestern corner of Yanchi. Since I'm going to be heading west by southwest when I leave tomorrow morning, that seemed the best place to aim for. That it would also get me up those last few kilometers to the magic minimum of "50 kilometers per day" was also a consideration.

I picked the Honghua Hotel because, of all the hotels, it was closest to food. There was another hotel—Heng'an—that I poked my nose in before the Honghua but I didn't want to spend 128 yuan for one night and, even more, I didn't want to try to figure out how to get my tour bike through their revolving door.

The registration software was one of the standard packages. Nothing especially weird. Except that once I'd clicked through to 境外游客 it wouldn't let me fill stuff in. This is now the second time for me that foreigner registration has existed but not worked. The first time was last year in Zhejiang and it was specifically a case where the police had disabled it because they wanted foreigners to come in to the police station to register.

(I've also had a total of three occasions where there was no option at all for foreigners with, one of those three times, the software being so badly coded it accepted us anyways.)

Just like the hotel owners in Zhao, this hotel owner was pretty sure that the local police had said "foreigners have to go to the foreigner approved hotel" at a meeting that hotel owners had gone to recently. Also like the hotel owners in Zhao (or the hotel owner in Jiangjin in 2012), there was nothing in writing.

I begin to sense a pattern regarding foreigners not being allowed. A pattern where the local police aren't allowed to say that we aren't allowed but, at the same time, they also don't want to allow us. Oddly enough, that's fine by me. The knowledge that it's not always ignorance or laziness but is sometimes an existing unwritten rule which they very clearly know they aren't allowed to either be making or enforcing, well that  makes it that much easier for me to firmly stand my ground.

So I got directions to the police station where I went and made a nuisance of myself.

I was, of course, perfectly willing to follow the rules and absolutely wanted to do everything right. I didn't want to cause trouble. In fact, if I could only know in advance where I wasn't allowed to go, I would happily make a point of not going to those places. But I absolutely needed to be shown in writing the specific rule or regulation that said that foreigners visiting this county needed to stay in a Foreigner Hotel. And if they couldn't find that written rule to show me, then they were going to have to take my registration the old fashioned way with photocopies of various pages of my passport because I simply would not accept enforcement of an unwritten rule.

I am such a bitch sometimes.

Other than having to repeatedly correct them again and again on my absolutely definitely not a journalist status, it goes pretty smoothly. I didn't even especially do anything that might lead them to conclude that I'm a journalist. In point of fact, all of my posturing, dick waving, and subtle threats came from my not especially exalted position in Chinese society. I can only presume that they were hoping for me to be a journalist so that they'd have actual written rules they could use against me.

Certainly, they tried hard enough to get me to admit to being a journalist. I've noticed that the Chinese police seem to favor a type of questioning technique which I refer to as "Mr. Smith, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" wherein any simple or obvious answer to the question will implicate you in having done something wrong. Complete with multiple people casually wandering by to slip in a friendly comment or query, if it were not for the total lack of skill with which they were exercising this technique, that I was at the police station of my own volition, and that I actually knew what the hell was going on, it was very much like the various officers during the Incident trying to get me to admit some knowledge of or connection to the package I had received in the mail.

Once it is clear that I'm going to get my way, I bite my tongue and don't respond to the comment that the unwritten restrictions on foreigners are for foreigners from "bad" countries (i.e. Muslim ones) as it's pretty clear from the behavior of the officer making this comment that his knowledge of the US comes from Chinese translations of Fox News and he therefore expects an American to wholeheartedly agree with his narrow minded prejudiced garbage. To be honest though, I don't have the time or inclination to be trying to change a stranger's views with regards to global politics when I haven't had dinner yet. 

The Honghua Hotel is perfectly lovely. A little bit worn around the edges the way you'd expect from, well, everything in China. The bathroom in my room is a retrofit job with a plumbing platform so high off the original ground that there's a stepstool to get into the bathroom. However, it's 80 yuan ($12) a night, it's near food, and the beds are sprung mattresses. It's really all I need.