My wife has been making monthly transfers from her WeChat to mine.

But this month when I tried to receive the payment, the app asked me to verify my identify by registering a SECOND bank account with WeChat - citing some regulatory requirements.

Has anyone else run into this? Is this a new thing, or have these monthly transfers accumulated over some threshold to trigger this?

I only have one bank account in China in my own name, do not wish to link (if even possible) corporate account that I have, nor open a second bank account just to verify my identify - but suppose I must if there's no other way.

A residence permit (temporary) is possible to renew months in advance, if there is even semi-good reason.

Say, you will be travelling elsewhere for couple of months, or like in my case my passport will expire in 2023 so already this year they reminded to renew next time (in 2022) a few months earlier so that I can get the 1-year RP until my passport expiration.

@sunjiangyu: "Did not need wife's hukou (did need her temporary Kunming residence permit because she's not from Kunming),"

In this situation, the last times I applied for marriage residence permit (that was a few years ago) they could not give more than 1 year, because wife was on 1 year temporary permits as well, and mine couldn't be longer than hers.

Was your choice of 2 year permit perhaps similarly based on your wife's permit?

I believe that at the time of Aichi conference in 2010, many European countries were already struggling to implement and manage their commitments to Europe's own "Natura 2000" program, which was agreed way back in 1992, a year before EU in its current form even existed.

Like I stated in earlier comment, in this kind of matters EU countries have the benefit of having an entity above their national governments, that they cannot simply ignore when inconvenient. There have been infringements, but also legal means to address those.

Few other countries have this. I would say that above all, PRC (and the ruling party here) would not accept any external (or internal) force to bind her sovereignty that way.

YaXu5: "nor the luxury of muscle flexing until 2030 or beyond. Reelections may be just around the corner"

I doubt that for example any EU country is going to commit to this kind of treaty without EU itself acting as proxy for it, and EU making that commitment on behalf of the member nations - details being subject to debates within EU first of course.

Subsequently most countries within EU (poke Poland) place EU directives above their national legislation, and as such national elections generally have no lawful relevance to continued commitments to EU level treaties - save exiting EU altogether, in extreme cases.