Rule card · China
Keep your China Unicom number active while abroad
Keep your China Unicom number active abroad. Unicom's own pages did not answer any client we tried, and this card does not copy the fixed-line 90-day freeze onto a Unicom number.
Checked against official pages on September 26, 2026. Rules move; when this one does, it goes on the changelog.
Rule at a glance
prepaid and postpaid- If you do nothing
- unverified
- Cheapest way to hold it
- unverified
- Roaming needed to receive codes abroad
- Unverified (China Unicom's own pages served nothing to any of the three clients we tried, so nothing here is taken from them)
- Twelve months away, roughly
- unverified
China Unicom is one of the three networks every guide about Chinese numbers mentions, and it is the one whose published terms we could not read at all. The cells above are empty for that reason and not for any other.
What we cannot yet say about a China Unicom number
The government page for the 电信服务规范 states "电话号码冻结时限最短为90日" in the fixed-line appendix. The mobile appendix was not on that page, and no China Unicom contract was in the pages we could read. The ninety days on the China Mobile and China Telecom cards come from those carriers' own agreements. They are not filled in here.
What we tried
Three clients, on 22 September 2026, because one failure usually means the tool rather than the site:
- curl with a browser user agent against the main portal and a provincial path: HTTP 200 with a 2.3 KB body, which is a shell rather than a page. No text to quote.
- Node's built-in fetch, same URLs: the same empty shells.
- A server-side fetcher: no answer from the main site at all, and the same shells from the portal.
A page that loads and contains nothing is a different failure from a page that refuses, and the distinction is worth keeping: Unicom's site is reachable and its help content is not in the HTML, which is typical of a JavaScript application. It also means "we could not read it" is the accurate statement, not "Unicom does not publish it".
What to do instead
Ask the carrier directly, and ask for the three numbers this card is missing: the monthly hold fee, the maximum period, and what happens to the account if it falls into arrears while suspended. The 10010 customer line and the provincial business halls are the channels; a written answer from them would fill this card faster than anything else.
If you already have that page or that reply, send it over and the card will be rewritten with the source named.
Where the verified cards are
China Mobile publishes its hold rules and prices them, and China Telecom publishes the parts of its agreement that we could reach. All three, with their sources, sit under keep your Chinese number active.