Before we left, we bought Lonely Planets travel guide to China. It's been a great help since the first day in China. You should get it as soon as possible when you have decided to travel or study in China. It contains a lot of useful information about everything you need during traveling. Visa applying, how to order food, basic phrases, transportation, sights etc. etc. Also a good place of information was the package our exchange organization Asia Exchange (www.asiaexhange.org) had gathered for us.
When moving from place to place in China its good make a habit out of collecting business cards. They come handy when travellig with taxi (the taxi drivers don´t understand english and most of them cannot read pinyin) or just asking directions, there is usually the address of the place in chinese and in english and on the other side there may be a map to the place. But in a short time there will be a lot of business cards so it´ s useful to start writing some notes to the cards so you´ ll stay in track with all the places. For us the most useful cards have been the ones to the Business Hotel in the shopping center near our university, card from our universitys international office and a card to our real estate company Fineland Real estate since it is in the same address as our home.
In the first two weeks we have been crash-landed into all offices and bureaus in China. When we signed the contract for the apartment we had to registrate in the police station within 72 hours. On top of that we lost one of our credit cards into an ATM and had to go the bank to get it. Also we are changin our visas into two-entry visas in the international office and for that we had to take pictures that have this serial number in them so after few unsuccesfull visits to the photographer we finally got the right photos and lots of useless photos of ourselves :) All in all it is good to keep in mind that what ever happens stay relaxed, altough it sometimes feels impossible. With the visas for example there suddenly came this legistlation in the middle of the applyings that international students cant get the multiple entry visas anymore. Some of us had already paid and went to the medical exams etc. for the visa and ended up losing a lot of money. So keep in mind that everything is possible in China :). At least every day is different.
There has been dozens of papers to fill and photographs to deliver, always keep your passport with you, they might ask it in a zoo, museum, bank and when getting an internet connection or phone number. But in the other hand it doesn´ t really differ from signign your social security number to various papers in Finland, in here it´s just all done with passports.