Two mistakes turn up in China visa files over and over, and they are really the same mistake in different clothes: the applicant has read about Schengen. So they buy a travel insurance policy nobody asked for. Then they pay full fare for a return ticket the checklist never demanded — weeks before anyone has decided anything.
Money out of the door in both directions, for a file that needed neither purchase. China’s tourist (L) checklist for Indian applicants is short and blunt, and it asks for different things than Europe does. Read it as itself and it is one of the more straightforward files to build. Read it through Schengen glasses and you spend on the wrong things, in the wrong order.
So, the three answers people come here for. Travel insurance is not on the checklist. The flight document named is a round-trip air ticket booking — a booking record, not a bought ticket. And a hotel reservation is on the list, right beside it, as the other half of your tour itinerary documents. Everything below traces to the Embassy’s and CVASC’s notices of August 2024, plus a CVASC fingerprint notice from December 2025 — all three linked at the bottom. Requirements change; those pages are the final word on the day you apply, and our China visa page keeps the working summary.
What the checklist actually asks for
Eight lines, and none of them exotic. What surprises people is not what is there — it is what is missing, and how ordinary the rest of it looks once you stop expecting a European document set.
The flight: read the words on the checklist
CVASC asks for tour itinerary documents including an air ticket booking (round trip). The Embassy version says airline ticket order. Both name a booking record. Neither says paid, ticketed or non-refundable — and that one word is worth real money to you.
Here is the advice, plainly: don’t buy the fare before the decision. A visa takes as long as it takes. If the dates shift, or the answer doesn’t go your way, a full-fare ticket bought in advance is your loss and nobody else’s. A genuine flight reservation — a live PNR in your name, showing your round-trip dates — answers the line on the checklist exactly, without staking the airfare on an outcome you don’t control.
What it can never be is invented. An edited PDF or a made-up reference is not a shortcut, it’s fraud, and it takes about ten seconds to catch: anyone can type the reference into the airline’s manage-booking page and see whether it resolves. Run that check on your own booking before somebody else does — our PNR verification walkthrough shows what a good result looks like.
The hotel: one set of dates, repeated everywhere
Beside the flight booking sits the second itinerary document: a hotel reservation covering your stay. The failure here is almost never a missing hotel. It’s a hotel whose dates don’t match the flight — a booking that starts a day after you land, or ends two nights before you fly home, because the two documents were made on different evenings from memory.
Pick your two dates once and make every page repeat them. Check in the day you land, check out the day you go home, name spelled as in the passport, city by city if you’re moving around, with each check-out becoming the next check-in. Then write the day-by-day itinerary from the bookings, never the reverse.
Insurance: the straight answer
This is the question that brings most readers here, so here it is without hedging: travel insurance does not appear on the official document checklist for a China tourist (L) visa from India. Not in the Embassy notice, not in the CVASC checklist. No certificate is asked for, because no cover is required.
That is genuinely different from Schengen, where travel medical insurance of at least €30,000 is written into the rules and a certificate goes into every file. The Schengen habit is where the confusion comes from, and it is also where the selling comes from — somebody will happily quote you a China visa policy on the strength of a rule that belongs to another country.
Not required is not the same as not sensible. A hospital abroad bills you in full, and a licensed travel policy is a small line next to the trip itself. Buy one if the trip justifies it. Just don’t let anyone tell you the visa demands it.
The bank balance people get wrong
The checklists ask for bank account deposit proof with a balance of ₹1,00,000, and the CVASC version looks for that balance held consistently across the six-month statement. That adverb is the whole item. Borrowing the money for a week produces a statement that runs flat and low for five months and then leaps just before submission — it answers the number and fails the question behind the number, which is whether you can fund this trip.
The rest of the paperwork is quick. A short personal cover letter says who you are, where you’re going, on what dates and who’s paying. Keep it to one page and keep every date in it identical to the bookings.
Fingerprints: check the date on the notice
A CVASC notice dated 29-12-2025 extends the exemption from fingerprint collection for short-term applicants staying up to 180 days until 31-12-2026. Long-term categories that lead to residence permits — work, study and similar — still enrol, and applicants under 14 or over 70 are exempt regardless. Note the shape of that: it is a dated, temporary measure that has already been extended once, so read the current notice on the day you book your submission rather than trusting a blog post about it. Including this one.
Build the file in this order
Sequence is what keeps a file consistent, and it costs nothing to get right. Fix the travel dates. Complete the online form. Then have the flight booking and hotel reservations issued a few days before you submit — late enough that every reference is live and checkable on the day, not so early that it has gone stale by the time someone looks. Write the itinerary from those documents. Then, the evening before your appointment, open each one at its source and confirm the name, route and dates yourself.
Do all of that and you have removed every reason to question the file that was yours to remove. What remains is the assessment itself, which was never yours to control: documents support an application, and the decision rests with the embassy or consulate. Anyone who promises you more than that is selling something.