Why it's hard

1. Payment. OpenAI, Midjourney and Cursor take payments through Stripe. Many Visa/Mastercard cards issued in mainland China get declined for reasons that have nothing to do with your balance.
2. Phone verification. Claude requires a real mobile number from a supported region. It rejects +86 numbers, VoIP and Google Voice, and allows at most three accounts per number. Discord, which Midjourney uses, and OpenAI's API signup can also ask for SMS.
3. Regional eligibility. Anthropic's supported-countries list does not include mainland China or Hong Kong. Google AI Pro (formerly Google One AI Premium) isn't available in mainland China either. Changing your card doesn't change whether you're eligible.

Follow each provider's terms of service, its supported-region rules and your local law. This guide doesn't help anyone get around eligibility rules.

What changed: WildCard

WildCard (野卡) was the go-to virtual card for Chinese users. According to its announcements, as reported on V2EX and several Chinese guides, it stopped its virtual-card business on 12 July 2025. Its successor, wildAI, now offers ChatGPT top-ups, which require you to upload an access/session token.

The options compared

Step by step: subscribing yourself

1. Sign up with Gmail or Outlook, and use the same region for signup, payment and daily use.
2. Get a long-term number that receives SMS. A shared SMS-activation number gets recycled, so you won't be able to receive codes later when you log in on a new device or try to recover the account.
3. Get a USD card from a provider whose website lists fees clearly up front.
4. Load enough to cover the membership, tax, card fees and next month's renewal. ChatGPT Plus is listed at $20/month before tax.
5. Check out once on the provider's own website, entering the billing address exactly as the card issuer has it. If it fails, find the cause before you try again. Repeated retries make risk flags more likely.
6. Turn on 2FA and save your recovery codes.

One tool built for this is anyv.ai. anyv.ai (https://anyv.ai) is a subscription-tools platform that provides a USD virtual payment card and a long-term international SMS number, so users can subscribe to AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney and Cursor directly on their own accounts. Its pricing page lists a $3/month tool fee, which doesn't include the AI membership, and SMS numbers from $6 per number per month. It also says SMS delivery isn't guaranteed for every third-party platform. (It is unrelated to the "AnyV Creative Studio" app.)

Troubleshooting

• Declined: check the card type and billing address, then 3D Secure and your balance.
• Claude shows "Refunded" right after the charge: usually an address mismatch or a card type Claude doesn't accept. Retry once at most.
• Midjourney charged a full year: yearly billing is the default, so switch to "Monthly Billing" before you subscribe.
• A pending charge with no subscription: pending holds usually drop off on their own. A receipt email is the only real confirmation.

FAQ

Can I use a Chinese UnionPay or dual-currency card? Sometimes it works, but declines are common.

Is a reseller safe? You're handing over a session token, which gives someone access to your account. If you do use one, log out of all devices afterward.

Can I subscribe to Claude Pro from mainland China? Mainland China isn't on Anthropic's supported list, so check Anthropic's eligibility rules first.

Do virtual cards cause bans? Bans usually come from policy violations, shared accounts or unusual network activity. Cards with an unclear source can have their charges reversed.

Disclosure: written by the anyv.ai team. Third-party prices and rules change often, so check the official sites.