Anyone know how to transfer money properly from a chinese account to an english account, apparently its not as simple as thought it would be as just used to doing between english accounts!

I don't know about ad hoc payments as I have never done it. But if you are here on a proper job contract, and you want to make regular payments, your employer (if legally allowed to employ foreigners) can pay a portion of your salary into an overseas account.

I transferred some money from my Bank of China account to my European one. It's complicated and it takes about one hour. You have to go to the bank, exchange rmb to euro or dollars (you can exchange up to 500$ daily), then you have to fill in some forms, sign several papers, fill in some more, pay around 200 rmb (or more depending how much you want to transfer) and in aprox. two days money will be on your European account. This is how it looks like in the Bank of China.

If you have an HSBC account, it's as easy as home. But with other banks, I think it's more like doing a wire transfer

I just send through Chinese paypal, you can have multiple banks attached and transfers in 2 to 7 days depending on the bank. I used boc to usaa

Just looking to make a one off payment to company in England of about £500, guess looking at advice will be a bit more of a problem than hoped for :)

I am looking into that issue as well since I will leave soon. It seems to be a headache.
From what I have understood, you have first to justify the money you are transferring. So all those income should be legal, work permit and salary justification from your company (to be sure you have paid your taxes). After that, a couple of papers to sign out, seems to be a bit long. However I have heard it's one of the cheapest way to send money abroad.

As well, if you have a Chinese friend that you trust you can go through him, since the citizens don't have such a long process to send money abroad, it's much easier for them.

Last one, if you have a union pay card you can withdraw money in your country with this card. But it seems you lose a bit of money compares to the bank transfer.

I wonder if you can use union pay (debit card) to make a payment to an overseas company.

Notice the pattern here, transferring money out of China = difficult, transferring money into China = easy. A indication of China's desire to gain more wealth? You bet.

Theres was a commercial running on the plasma TV screen (in a Kunming Bank of China), for students, on how (easily?) they now can access their Chinese Bank of China accounts in an overseas Bank of China by making some kind of special account. At least this was my interpretation. That should apply for businessmen and companies too.

This doesnt necessarily concern redjon77 (?), but has anyone ever succeeded in establishing an account in Bank of China you could access in London or Bangkok too? And not only through an ATM but by having some kind of "international account" you could access at the Bank of China counter in London for example?