Dun Jidong, a marketing manager with Ctrip, a leading online travel agency, said, "Many Chinese are scared away by the difficulty in filling out application forms printed in English and the inconvenience of personal interviews required for every applicant.

"Often an applicant has to stand in a line for nearly a day for the interview," Dun said. "More troublesome is that before the interview, the applicant has to wait a long, long time."

So many visa applications were submitted during the first half of 2010 and 2011 that applicants had to wait two to three months on average for the chance to interview, Dun said. That eliminated many travel plans with a short lead time.

The delay was compounded by the annual crush of applications for student visas from July through September.

For those who went through the whole process, many who answered a reporter's questions outside the US Embassy found it exhausting. One of them was Zhou Yan, a student from Shandong Normal University in East China.

She said she and her classmates had traveled more than 400 kilometers from Shandong to Beijing for an interview. "We waited for three hours, but the actual interview only took three minutes."

What's changing

The problem with the US visa system has been its capacity to handle the Chinese demand. US Ambassador Gary Locke has said China is the source of about 11 percent of all visa applications to the US, second only to Mexico.

The latest figures from the US State Department show that consular officers handled nearly 260,000 visa applications in China, an increase of 48 percent, in the last three months of 2011. Handling them better and quicker is the goal of policy changes.

The dragon dance produces smiles outside the It's a Small World ride at Disneyland during Spring Festival. About 1,000 Chinese mainlanders visited the California park on Jan 25. Hong Kong China News Agency